System Restore gone wrong

Hey,

Well, I made a bit of a ballsup of a Driver upgrade so decided the best course of action was System restore to earlier that day. So I did, I then decided to undo this Restore, then 10mins later to redo it. Yeah, I'm indesive, but now it seems some things have become doubled up. For Instance, as I show in the attached photo. All icons in Control Panel have doubled up. All Desktops Shortcuts doubled up. When I hit the 'Media Library' button when using Winamp 2 open up. My Start Menu Shortcuts have also doubled up. I haven't had a good look around to see any other errors. But, shoudl I be worried about this. Can I just delete the duplicate items and reinstall Winamp and then not worry?

hmm, I'm noticing that some items do not have duplicates. I wonder if that means something..

That does seem odd doesnt it.

I deleted most of the Start Menu Duplicates before I could get a screen shot, but I'll give ya an example of one, which is the same in every Menu.

Program Shortcuts are duplicated in every directory, so every program I have installed for example...(see attach)

I think the duplicates are caused by a bug in the System Restore tool. You may want to move any duplicates to a temporary location before permanently deleting them.

Mate,

Do the shortcuts point to the same executable? Is this only with shorcuts or is it with files as well?

From what I can see only shortcuts have been duplicated, the duplicates, in the start menu, control Panel, and in Folders, point to the same executable.

Has your system become slower or do you notice a bloated registry?

I am trying to ascertain if deleting the shortcuts is safe and see if you may have duplicate registry entries. I tried an MSDN/KB search but couldn't come up with anything relevent.

I had a look at the registry and I don't think there are any problems there. I was looking for duplicate entries, anything else i would have missed probably. I cant say I understand the registry and what it does. (Note to self, find out)

The system also doesn't seem abnormally slow, I have a completely full HDD which seems to slow it down alot. When it was restoring for the second time, it took about twice as long to do so, if it is relevant.

/me sings the "double your pleasure....double your fun" from the gum commercials.

whitebloodcell said:

I had a look at the registry and I don't think there are any problems there. I was looking for duplicate entries, anything else i would have missed probably. I cant say I understand the registry and what it does. (Note to self, find out)

The system also doesn't seem abnormally slow, I have a completely full HDD which seems to slow it down alot. When it was restoring for the second time, it took about twice as long to do so, if it is relevant.

Click to expand...

What happened? Did restoring a second time fix it? Did you restore from the same date or from an earlier date?

What I meant by the second restore was how I originally got this problem. By restoring, reversing, then restoring again.

O.K. Now what happens if you restore from a restore point earlier than the one causing trouble?

?(Confused by last post)

Generally I avoid system restore, using it only as a last resort. When you screw up with a driver update, usually the course of action is to rollback the driver itself, which is made very easy by windows xp. Restoring the entire system seems like a little bit of overkill and can fudge up some things(unintentionally of course, heh). Now if you couldn't get into windows to rollback the driver, save for safe mode, then do just that. Go into safe mode(this is done by pressing F9 right before Windows tries to load) and selecting safe mode from the list. Once the driver is removed or rolled back, you should be good to go.

But . . . seeing as my advice is bit late, I advise that you pick up some sort of software such as Registry Mechanic(I use this personally) or Advanced System Optimizer. They are shareware unfortunately but they will save your skin when it comes to these sorts of things, especially registry hassles. I've looked and looked for some sort of free version that does the same thing, but to no avail. If anybody else has suggestions on software and what works for them, I'd like to hear them. Sorry for the trouble you're experiencing and good luck.

/*Clearing up the confusion

If Mr.WBC restored his system to say May 6th and had problems with it, maybe restoring it to May 1st would help him start afresh.

I understand now, thanks . But I've been in that situation before and whilst restoring to a point earlier would seem to solve the problem, it only adds more to it. What if he had a few progs or new files downloaded after this little mishap? Those progs and files wouldn't completely disappear, but unfortunately they leave behind little remnants of themselves, duplicates if the prog had been reinstalled, clogging up the registry and computer in general. Its a real pain in the arse to hunt down all these little duplicates and useless files, making sure they aren't the essential ones, and getting rid of them for good. Thats why something like Registry Mechanic or ASO can become incredibly useful. Your registry is sifted thru to make sure there is no extra fat, and duplicate and useless files are deleted, never to plague your hard drive again.

On a side not, the trial version of Registry Mechanic will find all the errors in the registry for you, but it will only repair up to a certain number(somewheres around 25 or 30 as I recall). ASO's trial version however has full functionality when it comes to fixing your registry and cleaning excess files, so you may want to try that first.

Super Nade said:

/*Clearing up the confusion

If Mr.WBC restored his system to say May 6th and had problems with it, maybe restoring it to May 1st would help him start afresh.

Click to expand...

Unfortuantely I didnt have system restore turned on prior to May 4th since it was demanding more storage than I had. So I cant try out that option.

I have run pretty much everything included in Advanced System Optimizer, firstly I have to say thanks for reccomending it, great piece of software. I noticed that after the duplicate icons in Control Panel had not been removed, but now had an icon.

In the Option for checking Duplicate Files, it found several thousand, not sure if it safe to delete them though, many were game files, sam attributes but different in most cases folders. The image below gives an example.

Is there any way to tell the computer to delete any file with (2) in it?
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Holy cow!

Mate,

1. Try making backups of all your important stuff.
2. Manually create a restore point
3. Delete the duplicates
4. If something goes horribly wrong as a result, restore your system. You also have a backup of your files, so that should help in the event of you requiring to do an OS reinstall.

I want to eventually do an OS reinstall, over the past year my Comp has developed, several, lets say, quirks, that seem utterly random and just plain odd. (for instance just randomly stopping completely when typing in word)

...but I have 200GB of stuff I consider important (Music and Vids) , so back up will take a while. And I have the worst luck when it comes to backing up. My discs just seem to detereate so the Data on them is unaccessible. But, I will do the first Idea I think. And just hope nothing goes wrong.

I just noticed that there is two instances of explorer.exe running. Im thinking this may be part of the problem?

Looks like all things windows backups for the system restore were restored along with the current copies. Kind of wierd but that would explain why only some have 2 icons. I would try another restore. Also something like registry mechanic can search for doubls of files and delete them I think.