System Restore Problems

[Guest]

I changed my desktop view from XP View to Classic View to see if it would
help performance. It did not help. When I tried to change my desktop
appearance from Classic View to XP View I could not; the system would freeze,
and I had to unplug the power from the CPU to reboot.

My system is a Dimension 4600 with a 2.6 GHz P4 and 1.25GB RAM.
Additionally, I have a NEC ND-3520A (DVD Writer), a Sony CRX-216E (CD-RW), a
Maxtor 6E040L0, and a Western Digital WD800JB.

I am running Win XP with SP2, Ad-Aware SE 1.05 with reference file SE1R38
11.04.2005, ZoneAlarm 5.5.062.011, and AVG 7.0.308 with definition file
266.9.9. My ISP is Time Warner, and I have RoadRunner service.

I ran both Ad-Aware and AVG scans to check for spyware and virises, and they
reported no spyware and no viruses. I ran HiJackThis and had the log checked
on the HiJack board at Dell. The log did not show any problems.

Well, I did a system restore to a date before I changed the desktop, and now
I have my XP View back. Unfortunately, I had to restore to a date prior to
upgrades of MySQL and GIMP.

So I go to Add/Remove and get a message that I cannot uninstall GIMP (for
example, but the same thing happens with MySQL with a different file) because
the uninst000.dat file is missing. I know it is in folder c:\program
files\gimp-2.2(2) because system restore told me the folder had been renamed.

So I understand system restore renamed the folder because a folder of the
same name was to be restored. What I do not understand is why the restored
folder does not contain the complete set of original files.

Now I am unsure if I should (1) rename the restored folder to something else
and rename the old folder back to the original name and uninstall or (2) move
the required files to the restored folder and uninstall.

In addition, my DVD Writer now shows only 2 changes to Region left, although
I have only changed it once, and it had never showed anything other than 4
before the restore (from when I set it after I installed the drive). How do
I get myself into these situations?

Can anyone help me with this? Thank you.

 

[Galen]

In BuddyHollyLives <[email protected]> had this to say:

My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:

In addition, my DVD Writer now shows only 2 changes to Region left,
although I have only changed it once, and it had never showed
anything other than 4 before the restore (from when I set it after I
installed the drive). How do I get myself into these situations?

I can help with that one. The DVD player/writer has four options to change.
This has NOTHING to do with the OS. In fact, if you pull it out of your
system after all 4 changes and put it into another PC entirely you will
still have 0 changes left. Don't ask me how. I have no idea. I only
understand that that's how it works. You can restore until you're blue in
the face and nothing at all will change that. (Mind you I've heard of
software applications which will allow you to bypass that entirely or to
reset it but I don't think they're either legal or really worth the risk.) I
don't know where your second used one went off to but I know that chances
are that it's gone for good.

How? Well... You don't seem to be a 'typical home user' from your post. That
means that you like to push buttons and play with stuff. I'm certainly not
going to advise against that. No, not at all. Basically I learned much of
what I know (which isn't really that much) by breaking things so many times
that I either ran out of friends who knew how or money enough to have
someone fix it for me and had to learn to fix it on my own.

Your system has quite a bit of power with plenty of RAM. It's plenty fast.
There's no need, in my opinion, to go trying to tweak the few MB or so of
RAM being used for the themes, you won't see enough of an improvement by
doing so to warrant the lack of the pretty colors or the risks that you
accept when you start changing stuff around. (Instead of using restore you
could probably have booted into safe mode and changed it over in there.)
There's safer tweaks that you can use... Put your pagefile on a different
drive for instance. Use some of your RAM to run the taskbar in a separate
process. Make sure your HDD is set to use the highest available UDMA support
that it has or if it's SATA then the latest drivers for it. If you're
worried about RAM and feel that the OS is eating away at it due to themes
then get an updated video card with at least 128 MB of VRAM and disable the
on-board stuff.

As for uninstalling? Well that's going to be problematic now perhaps but
have you tried to remove the folders that they were in, deleting any
registry entries that they made, and finding any orphaned files? There's
third party uninstallers available. One of them might do the trick?

Finally... System Restore is not a backup tool. It's a tool that will do
exactly what it says. It restores the system state to an earlier setting
that hopefully worked. For backup you really should consider
cloneing/ghosting your drive to another drive (I find that to be the best
method) or getting a 10 pack of DVD R/Ws and using an application (I am not
going to recommend a specific brand) to backup your system to them. That way
you're free to poke at most anything you want to and instead of running the
risk of losing it all and having to re-install everything when you do, not
when you might but when you do as we all do it eventually, hose the system
beyond repair you have the opportunity to restore it to the last time you
saved everything in a very short time and all of your settings are still in
place.

Galen

 

[Bert Kinney]

Hi,

When you restored to a date previous to the updates in question any
files monitored by System Restore (SR) where reverted to that previous
date. Any file not monitored by SR were left alone. So now there is a
mix of new and old program files which will cause the uninstall to
fail.

Here are two possible solutions:

1. Try reinstalling the programs in question then either update them
or uninstall them.

2. Undo the restore then uninstall the programs in question then
perform the restore. Now all you should have to do is update the
programs.

For more information on System Restore.
http://home.earthlink.net/~mvp_bert/index.html

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the DVD tip. I'm still scratching my head on that one because I
cannot recall anything I have done since installing that bugger. It is as if
the drive is changing itself from time to time. Oh well, maybe NEC can
answer it. I actually was in Safe Mode to do virus and spyware scans. I
looked at the Appearance Tab of the Display Properties and only Windows
Classic was in the pulldown. Is there another way to change it?

 

[Galen]

In BuddyHollyLives <[email protected]> had this to say:

My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:

Thanks for the DVD tip. I'm still scratching my head on that one
because I cannot recall anything I have done since installing that
bugger. It is as if the drive is changing itself from time to time.
Oh well, maybe NEC can answer it. I actually was in Safe Mode to do
virus and spyware scans. I looked at the Appearance Tab of the
Display Properties and only Windows Classic was in the pulldown. Is
there another way to change it?

Actually you might not be able to change it that easily from within safe
mode now that I think about it. You might have had to force users to use a
certain theme which can be done (on XP Pro) via the GPEDIT.MSC section if I
recall though I don't remember where in there it is specifically. If it was
causing you to crash in regular mode an idea might have been to check and
stop some of the running services or to look in the error log (eventvwr.msc)
to see if there's any errors from the attempts to start it and what they
are. A quick check shows that it's not dependent on any other services so as
long as the service was up and running (set to automatic) then it *should*
have started, if failed it should have tried again... Do you have a lot of
processes running? Did you at that time?

Galen

 

[Guest]

In BuddyHollyLives <[email protected]> had this to say:

My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:


I can help with that one. The DVD player/writer has four options to change.
This has NOTHING to do with the OS. In fact, if you pull it out of your
system after all 4 changes and put it into another PC entirely you will
still have 0 changes left. Don't ask me how. I have no idea. I only
understand that that's how it works. You can restore until you're blue in
the face and nothing at all will change that. (Mind you I've heard of
software applications which will allow you to bypass that entirely or to
reset it but I don't think they're either legal or really worth the risk.) I
don't know where your second used one went off to but I know that chances
are that it's gone for good.

How? Well... You don't seem to be a 'typical home user' from your post. That
means that you like to push buttons and play with stuff. I'm certainly not
going to advise against that. No, not at all. Basically I learned much of
what I know (which isn't really that much) by breaking things so many times
that I either ran out of friends who knew how or money enough to have
someone fix it for me and had to learn to fix it on my own.

Your system has quite a bit of power with plenty of RAM. It's plenty fast.
There's no need, in my opinion, to go trying to tweak the few MB or so of
RAM being used for the themes, you won't see enough of an improvement by
doing so to warrant the lack of the pretty colors or the risks that you
accept when you start changing stuff around. (Instead of using restore you
could probably have booted into safe mode and changed it over in there.)
There's safer tweaks that you can use... Put your pagefile on a different
drive for instance. Use some of your RAM to run the taskbar in a separate
process. Make sure your HDD is set to use the highest available UDMA support
that it has or if it's SATA then the latest drivers for it. If you're
worried about RAM and feel that the OS is eating away at it due to themes
then get an updated video card with at least 128 MB of VRAM and disable the
on-board stuff.

As for uninstalling? Well that's going to be problematic now perhaps but
have you tried to remove the folders that they were in, deleting any
registry entries that they made, and finding any orphaned files? There's
third party uninstallers available. One of them might do the trick?

Finally... System Restore is not a backup tool. It's a tool that will do
exactly what it says. It restores the system state to an earlier setting
that hopefully worked. For backup you really should consider
cloneing/ghosting your drive to another drive (I find that to be the best
method) or getting a 10 pack of DVD R/Ws and using an application (I am not
going to recommend a specific brand) to backup your system to them. That way
you're free to poke at most anything you want to and instead of running the
risk of losing it all and having to re-install everything when you do, not
when you might but when you do as we all do it eventually, hose the system
beyond repair you have the opportunity to restore it to the last time you
saved everything in a very short time and all of your settings are still in
place.

Galen
--
Signature changed for a moment of silence.
Rest well Alex and we'll see you on the other side.


my windows wont start it say windows system32 configuration fi le is either corrupt or missing it wont start windows. can i fix it without the sytem restore disc

 

[Galen]

In ryan <[email protected]> had this to say:

My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:

Maybe. Can you get into Safe Mode? Can you use Last Known Good
Configuration? Start the PC and start pressing the F8 key over and over
again until a special menu appears.

Galen

 

[Guest]

Hi,

When you restored to a date previous to the updates in question any
files monitored by System Restore (SR) where reverted to that previous
date. Any file not monitored by SR were left alone. So now there is a
mix of new and old program files which will cause the uninstall to
fail.

Here are two possible solutions:

1. Try reinstalling the programs in question then either update them
or uninstall them.

2. Undo the restore then uninstall the programs in question then
perform the restore. Now all you should have to do is update the
programs.

For more information on System Restore.
http://home.earthlink.net/~mvp_bert/index.html

Okay. Thanks to all of you who offered your assistance.

Here's what I've done and how things are.

(1) I had to manually delete GIMP and MySQL. I tried to uninstall them,
but that failed, as I have previously noted. I then tried to install them
followed by an uninstall, but the install failed. Thus the manual delete. I
must say I have learned more than I had expected about the directory, but it
is well worth learning. I did export my directory to a hive file before
changing it so I could recover if need be.

(2) My initial performance problems are back (what sent me here in the first
place). My browsing performance is what bothers me most. I can affect it
for a very short time by releasing and renewing my IP lease, flushing my DNS
cache, and refreshing my DHCP lease. This helps temporarily, but it surely
is no fix.

(3) I have upgraded the flash on my router and the driver for my NIC. If I
run any diagnostics (tracert, bandwidth tester in Firefox, pings, etc.), they
do not indicate problems. However, my browser performance is terrible.

(4) I still have no idea why my DVD writer went from 4 to 2 of Region
changes remaining, when all I did was a system restore. I have done nothing
to the drive since installing it.

If I now need to move this to another forum, please let me know, and I will
do so.

 

[Bert Kinney]

Hi,

You may want to start a new thread with the specific problem as the
subject in this newsgroup or the networking group.