Lost program & System Restore question
 

My neighbor using Xp lost their paint program, they have searched their system to no avail. They don't know if this can be done with System Restore(without losing a years worth of downloads & data) or not. Isn't it on one of their start up disks? If so which one? I'm not much help.
What's the best way to get paint back?

I know this is an easy one for you guys.

Thanks for any and all help!

No need to use System Restore. Re-installing the program via add/remove programs should do the trick.

Start
Settings
Control Panel
Add Remove Programs
Add Remove Windows Components
Accesories and Utilities
Accesories
Click Paint

That should do the trick.

The file is called mspaint.exe and normally resides in c:\windows\system32

What if they deleated it from add/remove would it still show up?
A bunch of 13 year old girls have tried to fix this and I don't know what they have done.

Can I also burn a copy mspaint.exe or has Microsoft blocked copying their software?

You shouldn't be able to delete Paint from that location in Add/Remove.

You possibly could just copy mspaint.exe from another XP machine and put it in their \windows\system32 directory... then you'd just have to create a shortcut in your accessories menu for it.

Paint won't show up in the Add/Remove Programs portion of the control panel, you gotta dig a little deeper.

Do this:

Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs > Add/Remove Windows Componants > Accessories & Utilities

Then click on "Details"

Now click on "Accessories"

Click on "Details"

Towards the bottom is "Paint"

Make sure the check box is checked. If not, check it, default through all the prompts and voila.

If it's checked however, and the mspaint.exe is in fact nowhere to be found on the machine, let us know and we'll walk you through using XP's System Restore. Typically, as long as this is a recent problem, you won't lose much, if anything when doing a restore.