Glory's Sun

Ok so here's the story. Someone fucked up our financial machine pretty badly. She was installing Norton and she opened up a pretty beefy program during installation and blam! nothing works now. All the icons are missing and all programs come up with an error "file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action, create an association for this option in the control panel". I try to go to control panel.. it just wants to make a shortcut.

I try to run a sfc /scannow nothing. I can't get into cmd. So I go to Safe Mode with Command Prompt.. and it won't run that either. I try to get into system restore using %systemroot%\system32\restore\rstui.exe and well it just comes up with a blank white box. So I try to run a repair on the existing installation.. nothing. Same thing occurs.

Ok so I'm fed up at this point. I finally get into regedit using Safe Mode with Command prompt. Under HHKEY_LOCALMACHINE_ /software/microsoft/windowsNT/winlogon and the explorer.exe key is correct. Then I try to go HHKEY_CLASSES_ROOT /.exe and it won't let me do anything. It just comes up with an error stating :Error Editing Value: Cannot Edit: Error reading the value's contents. So now I'm lost I don't know where to go from here. I do have backups of all the stuff but it will take forever to get the machine back how it was. I'm trying to avoid formatting at all costs.


Windows XP Pro SP 2
Any ideas?? Any help is mucho mucho mucho appreciated.

sashime76

Use Hiren BootCD if you have one, make a second partition and make it primary/boot then install another copy of WinXP. You/she can read the files from the new installation. Backup all the important stuff and get rid of the old partition if you wish.
I'd recommend ditching Norton or even Mcafee, BitDefender has been working great for me, costs much less, too.

cyrnel

I swear, Norton is geek job security. It's too fragile.

It _might_ be quicker to fix than re-install. Tough by remote control though. And if it's a production system I'm not sure how comfortable I'd be patching things together and leaving. The fact Norton yacked part way through its install could mean a lingering mess.

Quickest might be a repair install. At least the registry entries will be repaired and the apps won't have to be reinstalled. You can clean up Norton after hours.

If you're hellbound to fix it you could try editing the reg files on another system, or as sashime said, boot knoppix, ultimatebootcd, etc for tools.

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Glory's Sun

I tried doing a repair but it didn't work. The registry didn't change at all. So what I did was I put in a second HDD and started installing windows. As I was installing it came up with a BSOD about an internal kernal error and shutdown. On the next startup, no devices were even showing up in the bios. So.. I have a new mobo on the way. *sigh* The funniest thing about the whole thing was pdf's and adobe would work but nothing else would come up. So for now I'm waiting on the new mobo to come in today and we'll go from there I guess.

sashime76

Reason I suggested a parallel installation is that I had an unrecoverable freezeup just 10 days ago. I tried every trick in my bag but none worked, down time - 3 days. As a last resort I did what I suggested above and was back online in 1 1/2 days. My system needed a purge anyway, got rid of unused, outdated programs and did a fresh install and it runs faster than before.

Good luck!

Glory's Sun

That's basically where I'm at now. I'm just going to do a fresh install and go from there. I've gone with Trend Micro for A/V since I've never had a problem with their stuff. Luckily, I had backups of all the finacial and FCC data on the machine so although it's annoying to do a fresh install on this particular machine I have the comfort of not having lost any data.

Thanks for the suggestions and help