grumpyolddude

I've inherited a Gateway pc with a 1.4ghz Athlon and WindowsME. When I got it, the system would not boot, and I do not have the original Gateway system disks.
I pulled the hard drive (20g Maxtor) and slaved it to another pc. I scanned and found 38 viruses, several of which could not be cleaned. After quarantining and deleting, the Gateway still would not boot. I decided to get drastic.
I've bumped the RAM to 384mg (1-256 of pc133 sdram + 1-128 of pc133 sddram), I replaced the maxtor with a 20g Samsung and an 80g samsung. I'm using the on-board S3 graphics and a Nightingale PCI sound card. I put WinXP home on the system and it ran great. However, I don't have an license for the copy I used, so I formatted and decided to try WinME, since it was the original OS on the system.
It has taken me two days to get to the point where I am writing this on my newly rescued system. What should have been a simple install has been a plague of restarts, reboots, re-formats, and regurgitations. ON every boot-up, the system locks and when I strike ctrl/alt/del I see the same thing: "msgsrv32 not responding" . When I end that task, the system finishes booting... slowly. And every command is responded to... slowly.
At one point, I said "to hell with it!" I formatted and tried to install Win98, but it kept locking up when it reached "setting up plug-and-play devices". So, I went back to ME and keep having the same problems.

MY QUESTION (finally): What the heck is "msgsrv32"? Is it critical? Can I make it stop trying to load? Can I fix it so it loads properly? Is it related to why the system responds so slowly?

BTW: I've gone to the Gateway website and downloaded the updated drivers and such for the system. Ive downloaded the Windows critical updates. I'm going to put Zone Alarm and AGV antivirus on the system. This is intended as a first system Christmas gift (hey... we do what we can, y'know. Besides, it won't be a gaming or multi-media machine).

I've tried to provide all of the pertinent info. Any help out there? Thanks!

Dilbert1234567

http://www.liutilities.com/products/...rary/msgsrv32/

looks unimportant to me.

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grumpyolddude

Dilbert!!!!

That was fast and fabulously helpful! Thank you!

Now... can I get rid of that UGLY ME splash screen?

bal8664

You can probably disable it by typing msconfig into the run command in the start menu and disabling it from the startup tab. To change the windows me splash screen replace the file called logo.sys ( either in c:\ or c:\Windows) with a 256 color bitmap thats 320x400 pixels (it'll stretch it to the correct shape). You can make your own in paint if you want and just rename it to logo.sys. If you want to just diable it permenantly you have to rick click on the file called msdos.sys in c:\ and select properties. From there un-check read-only. Then open that file up in notepad and changte Logo=1 to Logo=0. Good luck! and i seriously recommend getting the XP upgrade, ME has alot more problems than the ones you've experienced.

bendsley

Whatever you were saying about it being unimportant, did you read anything else about it by any chance? Don't assume because one place tells you what it does that something in Windows might not be important. Everything in Windows is tied together.

Msgsrv32.exe is a program (Windows 32-bit message server) that performs several background functions necessary for Windows operation.

These functions include:

* Load installable Windows drivers at startup and unload them at shutdown
* Run the shell program (usually Explorer.exe) and re-run the shell if it fails to respond
* Mediate Plug and Play messages among various parts of the operating system
* Coordinate automatic responses to Setup programs. This includes checking whether a Setup program has improperly overwritten Windows files, and optionally restoring the Windows versions of those files
* Display the initial logon dialog box if networking is enabled
* Play the system startup and shutdown sounds

It is quite an important little program. See right up there where I listed, "runs the shell"? Yeah, that's something that you want in proper working order.

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Dilbert1234567

i think the "Load installable Windows drivers at startup and unload them at shutdown" is the problem

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aarchaon

This may or may not be relevant but you could try getting rid of the abomination otherwise known as "ME" and install XP. You will have a lot less problems with it and the performance will be the same or better. I have got XP SP2 running on an Athlon K-6 300mHz with 128mb RAM, so your system should have no problems whatsoever with it.

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mikec

not relevant aarchaon...

grumpy, google, msgsrv32.exe and do some research. there are a # of MS KB articles that come up involving that .exe. for example: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=306616 - It revolves around ACPI and older computer's lack of support for it. This link might help you to work around it. http://www.nibbleguru.com/probs/165/1425

of course, aarchaon's solution is the best one, esp. if you had xp working on it before, but if you don't have an extra copy handy, that's obviously not going to work for you...GOOD LUCK!!!

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skaven

Dude WinME was the worst OS release Microsoft ever made. If I were you I'd put Win2k on that system and leave all your troubles behind. 2k's licensing scheme is a bit less, uhm... "picky" than WinXP's, so I'm sure you could "buy" a "working" copy from somewhere.... like... uhm.... *cough*suprnova.org*cough*...

grumpyolddude

YEp. I understand that ME sucks. I even considered just installing 98se. I may end up shelling out for XP before this is all over. I was, however, trying to make do with the resources at hand., Hell, for $300 US I could get a Dell + an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier with XP, Word Perfect, and a bunch of other whistles and bells. Skaven has an interesting alternative to investigate... and you've all given me a ton of support. Thanks, all!