Hi, My IE6 became unstable, I could not open any link. I tried every recipe in the book. Upgrading to IE7 was the same. The only option left was to reinstall Windows. I could not launch the installer program from the proprietary disk so I went and bought a full WinXP OEM SP2 version. As Murphy's Law would have it, I did not study the problem b4 hand not being able to surf and reinstalled WinXP SP2 over patched SP1 version and now I am stuck in the activation mud. I've recovered the product ID for the early version and I have a full OEM version with a new product ID. The proprietary disk is useless, you have to reformat the entire drive to install the original image. I realize now that wpa info could have been saved b4 the install. I tried to recover wpa files using recovery tools, but it seems they were not deleted but overwritten and are not good anymore. When I try to launch activation, the popup tells me it encountered an error and needs to close. I have the same hardware as before, no changes. One symptom you may be familiar with is when I try opening microsoft.com I get a popup "the requested lookup key was not found in any activation context." Is there anything that I can do without formatting the drive? Regards, qlooless
hi, I'm sorry for taking up space on the forum, but I found a solution. This situation is quite common and happens 1 in 20 rather than 1 in a 1000. *symptoms* My machine is about 5 years old, and I was not running Windows XP for quite some time. One day I needed to run it again, so I needed to upgrade to SP2. When I launched IE6 I noticed that it was not "behaving" correctly. Upgrade went OK, but IE was still misbehaving. Whenever I launched it, I could not open any link, it would exit prematurely, also the search utility was crashing the same way. I upgraded to IE7 hoping that it would fix the problem. It didn't. It turns out that 95% of the software is dependent on IE6 or higher, we are given IE6 vs. Mozilla alternative no longer. Other browsers were running OK. Running sfc /scannow did not reveal any problems, neither did a virus and adware check. A call to tech support was even less promising. The proprietary manufacturer's rescue disk could only restore the factory image, it would destroy all partitions and other software that is working fine. Formatting the entire drive seemed a drastic fix for one piece of software that is not working. I tried unloading all IE plugins, but that didn't solve anything. Trying to reinstall IE from Windows\inf\ie catalog by right clicking required a full version installation CD. The last option was reinstalling Windows XP. No one carries SP1 anymore, even SP2 is not easy to come by. I got SP2 OEM version, since I did not like the DRM stuff in Vista upgrade, and probably it would require expensive hardware upgrade at the same time. I discovered that XP has anti-piracy features after the fact. I should have performed system backup, especially the %sytemroot%\system32\wpa.dbl and wpa.bak files before upgrading. *solution* It turns out the problem was IE7 upgrade, which the reinstall of XP left intact. Trying to register the DLLs by start->run->regsrv32 urlmon.dll did not resolve the issue. Running the IE7 uninstaller finally fixed it, start->run->c:\windows\ie7\spuninst\spuninst.exe. After all trace of IE7 was removed, I could successfully launch Windows activation and register the new key.
media player 11? hi, I attempted to install media player 11 and my system is unstable again, IE, search, and system restore are not working. Has anyone had similar experience?
How about tryin same-same as with IE? Uninstall WMP11? I was using WinXP for a long time, upgraded etc but never experienced any problems as described herein. I backuped my files often and if something wasn't working properly, after a time I just formatted HD. I'm not that convenienced with the tools provided, such as SystemRestore... EDIT A lot of people I know were/are using WinXP. I've never heard of troubles such as yours... Or else, get Vista I did so. Everything works, it's fast and reliable. And indeed really stable.
hi, I've uninstalled media player and tried reinstalling Windows again, but it is not working. IE exists as soon as you click on any link, search utility is not working if you select anything in the window, and system restore does not launch. It must be some kind of patch lurking around.
What did you do in the meantime? Of course, there are a lot of diagnosis tools and whatsoever but I'd just backup my files and then format the HDD. After that, there shouldn't be any failures anymore What upgrades did you install? Just the whole bunch that MS offered? What software do you use, besides windows standard software? I experienced a problem that was caused by a cleanup-tool. It just blocked an important system file, and after uninstalling the (useless, by the way) tool everything worked properly. Maybe its a firewall or another security bric-a-brac that is blocking something important?!
hi, When I bought the laptop, I doubt I ran Windows for more than a week after activating it. The only things that were on it were a couple of games which I played a few times. I ran Unix all the time without any problem on the other partition. I had SP1 up until two weeks ago, never applied any patches or connected to a network. Would that I had deleted it altogether. When I tried downloading SP2 upgrade is when I noticed the IE and the search not working right. Partitioning is probably what made it unstable.
Maybe the problem is due to unix or the partition itself. Maybe you use another partition method than the one that is necessary...
Did you check your partition with "chkdsk drive: /f", where drive: is your win ppartition. I think problem isn`t in partition - try to rebuild windows with dial-a-fix -it`s free.