My neighbour came around today for some help fixing his PC because it has a strange problem. The machine boots to the desktop and everything seems fine appart from there are no icons on the desktop and I cant click on the desktop either. If I right click on the desktop to bring up the menu, just nothing happens. So, I go into control panel through the start menu and click on display settings and set his wallpaper to none in case he has like a 50 meg bitmap as his desktop slowing everything down or something, then I double click on the System icon so I can check if theres any faulty devices and nothing happens. I then notice that nothing in control panel will open so I go into the start menu and the start menu locks up as I am browsing through. I reboot and it hangs at shutting down windows and I have to hit the reboot button. Then after its booted up again its the same thing, I can only open 1 thing from control panel, after that I get a few moments to change a few settings then explorer locks up.
So I look at his systray and he has like 15 icons taking up half his taskbar, there was everything there, lotus smartsuite stuff, MS office stuff, norton antivirus & internet security so I decide to get rid off it all becasue I was betting on it being some of the norton stuff so I use taskman to reboot (ohh yeah something else thats important I tell you, I go into taskman and even though the desktop and start menu are locked up, CPU usage is like 1 - 2 % and memory usage is about 90 meg, I look at processes and sure enough System idle process is at 98% ish but
I look at the User Name columb and its blank! so I cant see whats a system process and what the user is running, and nothing seems to be tieing up system resources!) .. anyway I reboot in safe mode this time and everything is fine! desktop icons are all there and I can click on them and right click on the desktop and bring up the menu. So I open the various norton apps and disable startup with windows then I delete everything from the windows Startup folder then I use regedit to delete everything from the RUN registry key except 5 or 6 things like the kernal fault check, then I reboot again in normal mode but its still the same thing. Desktop is locked up and start menu locks up a couple of minites later.
So there must be something that is starting up during a normal startup that isnt starting up during Safe Mode, and is causeing this problem. A setting maybe. Also, something is telling me it might be his modem software because he mentioned that he was having problems with his connection settings and every time I reboot the machine, I get a End Task window appear for RUNDLL32 , then after that I get another one for Explorer so I end them then it starts to shut down but hangs on Windows is now shutting down.
Tommorow I am going to try deleting his network connections and check out msconfig. I guess maybe I should have done that before butchering his registry
but its cool I exported it first
The PC is a brand new Packard Bell pentium 4 machine with plenty ram and disk space etc.. I dont know the exact specs but I can find out if need be.
Does anyone have any ideas what might be causing this or have any suggestions on where to look next? Thanks
So I look at his systray and he has like 15 icons taking up half his taskbar, there was everything there, lotus smartsuite stuff, MS office stuff, norton antivirus & internet security so I decide to get rid off it all becasue I was betting on it being some of the norton stuff so I use taskman to reboot (ohh yeah something else thats important I tell you, I go into taskman and even though the desktop and start menu are locked up, CPU usage is like 1 - 2 % and memory usage is about 90 meg, I look at processes and sure enough System idle process is at 98% ish but
I look at the User Name columb and its blank! so I cant see whats a system process and what the user is running, and nothing seems to be tieing up system resources!) .. anyway I reboot in safe mode this time and everything is fine! desktop icons are all there and I can click on them and right click on the desktop and bring up the menu. So I open the various norton apps and disable startup with windows then I delete everything from the windows Startup folder then I use regedit to delete everything from the RUN registry key except 5 or 6 things like the kernal fault check, then I reboot again in normal mode but its still the same thing. Desktop is locked up and start menu locks up a couple of minites later.
So there must be something that is starting up during a normal startup that isnt starting up during Safe Mode, and is causeing this problem. A setting maybe. Also, something is telling me it might be his modem software because he mentioned that he was having problems with his connection settings and every time I reboot the machine, I get a End Task window appear for RUNDLL32 , then after that I get another one for Explorer so I end them then it starts to shut down but hangs on Windows is now shutting down.
Tommorow I am going to try deleting his network connections and check out msconfig. I guess maybe I should have done that before butchering his registry
but its cool I exported it firstThe PC is a brand new Packard Bell pentium 4 machine with plenty ram and disk space etc.. I dont know the exact specs but I can find out if need be.
Does anyone have any ideas what might be causing this or have any suggestions on where to look next? Thanks
