I manage a small windows 2000 domain with a mix of win2k and xpsp2 machines.

Starting around the begining of april the xp machines lost the search
function, the msi installer would not run and hyperlinks in email messages
did
nothing, amongst other things.
I have found that the symptoms are described exactly in
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/274696
but this apparently only applies to win2k and when I run dcomcnfg.exe it
just closes when trying to expand the computers folder in the left hand pane.

I have found the I can restore normal functions by disjoining the pc from
the domain and then rejoining it but the problems reoccur after a few days.

I have installed xpsp3 on twoof the pcs but the problem still happens.
I dont think it is malware related as the machines all have uptodate av and
as a diagnostic I took a hard disk ofsite and scanned it in another pc using
4
diffent programmes.

Any Ideas anyone ?


--
Mike

Mike Osbourn <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> I manage a small windows 2000 domain with a mix of win2k and xpsp2
> machines.
>
> Starting around the begining of april the xp machines lost the search
> function, the msi installer would not run and hyperlinks in email
> messages did
> nothing, amongst other things.
> I have found that the symptoms are described exactly in
> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/274696
> but this apparently only applies to win2k and when I run dcomcnfg.exe
> it just closes when trying to expand the computers folder in the left
> hand pane.
>
> I have found the I can restore normal functions by disjoining the pc
> from the domain and then rejoining it but the problems reoccur after
> a few days.
>
> I have installed xpsp3 on twoof the pcs but the problem still happens.
> I dont think it is malware related as the machines all have uptodate
> av and as a diagnostic I took a hard disk ofsite and scanned it in
> another pc using 4
> diffent programmes.
>
> Any Ideas anyone ?

Did this happen to all computers all at once?
Event logs give you any clues?
Installing SP3 is not what I'd try here. It's not known to be devoid of
other problems and you're introducing a lot of new things onto a workstation
by using that. I'd get all the PCs fully patched to everything *but* SP3.