MMC and other system utilities not starting without any error mess

[Red_Blue]

I have a fully patched XP Pro SP3 laptop where no MMC snap-in (or mmc.exe
itself) is starting and also things like ntbackup.exe and msinfo32.exe are
not starting.

They give _no error messages_, nothing just happens when clicking things
under for example Control Panel/Administrative Tools (actually the Finnish
equivalents, this is a Finnish language Windows) or trying to start things
from the console.
There are probably others in addition to mmc, ntbackup and msinfo32 that are
not launching, but basically this problem seems to be limited to Windows
components and not applications.

Some things that do work are IE7 and Windows Explorer. Things ruled out thus
far are simple drive errors and installed AV.

I wish I knew what happened to the machine just before it started acting up
like this, but reports from the user indicate that the latest patches are
probably the only things installed on it recently. Can't look at any logs
since Event Viewer is part of the problem.

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

Most likely a registry tampering problem.

How to Recover from a Corrupted Registry -config-system:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q307545

 

[Red_Blue]

Most likely a registry tampering problem.

How to Recover from a Corrupted Registry -config-system:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q307545

Thanks for your reply, but the linked article addresses a situation where
the system is not even booting due to corrupted registry _files_. This is not
the situation here.

I'm also not willing to yet entertain extreme measures such as pruning the
registry entirely or reinstalling Windows, since like I reported, everything
non-Windows related works and I don't wish to reinstall and reconfigure those
for a Windows problem.

Also the article has this caveat:

Warning Do not use the procedure that is described in this article if your
computer has an OEM-installed operating system.

This is an OEM Windows on Fujitsu-Siemens laptop.