Win 98SE Bluescreen lockup after ZoneAlarm upgrade

D

Dugie

Hi all,

A friend is having an unhappy computer Christmas experience.

She's running Win98 SE, and just tried to upgrade to Zone Alarm 5.5. During the upgrade process, a ZoneAlarm restart
window came up. Then WinPatrol cut in, saying, "A command is being added to the Win.ini file. Ok?"
Selecting View command gave "Null (something) with a filename ending with .RG something."
She closed the Winpatrol window, and the computer restarted, then got her regular restart Win 98 blue screen, and
the computer locked.

She tried her emergency reboot disk, did a dir of C:, which showed far fewer files/dirs than it should have. She
chose reinstall Win, with the option to keep original files (not a clean install). This hasn't worked. The computer
freezes on the blue screen.

Any ideas as to what happened, or advice for her?

Thanks!

- Dugie
 
D

Donnie Russell

Dugie said:
Hi all,

A friend is having an unhappy computer Christmas experience.

She's running Win98 SE, and just tried to upgrade to Zone Alarm 5.5.
During the upgrade process, a ZoneAlarm restart
window came up. Then WinPatrol cut in, saying, "A command is being
added to the Win.ini file. Ok?"
Selecting View command gave "Null (something) with a filename ending with .RG something."
She closed the Winpatrol window, and the computer restarted, then got
her regular restart Win 98 blue screen, and
the computer locked.

It's hard to say exactly what happened, but at this point I would have
rebooted the computer, pressing F8 repeatedly until the boot menu
appeared, then selected "Safe Mode". Then I would have stopped any
programs running in the background, and tried to uninstall ZoneAlarm.

Under Windows 9x, when files are replaced during an installation, and
those files are locked, the files are replaced at the start of the next
boot. This process may have been interrupted or not completed properly
because of the intervention of another program. An uninstall may have
been able to roll everything back to almost the way it was.
She tried her emergency reboot disk, did a dir of C:, which showed
far fewer files/dirs than it should have. She
chose reinstall Win, with the option to keep original files (not a
clean install). This hasn't worked. The computer
freezes on the blue screen.

The fewer files may indicate a file system error. Run scandisk c: from
a bootdisk and fix anything that it reports.

At this point, I would look for backups of system files that are often
saved by an install program, and restore the original files from the
backups. They are found in the c:\Windows folder and look something
like this:

system.bak or system.in_ -> system.ini
win.bak or win.in_ -> win.ini

You can edit the .ini files yourself, removing any references to
ZoneAlarm.

Backups of the registry are made automatically by Windows 98 SE.
Windows 98 SE should try to restore a damaged registry, but in this
case I think it is not damaged, but instead has faulty settings. I
forget the procedure for restoring a backed up registry manually, but
it should be easily found with Google.

While in safe mode or from a DOS boot disk, if ZoneAlarm can't be
uninstalled, you could try to remove any vxd files or programs that run
at startup and belong to ZoneAlarm (which does have low level access to
the system), but that is a very complicated procedure.
Good luck. I hope this helps.
 
D

Dugie

You can edit the .ini files yourself, removing any references to
ZoneAlarm.

Backups of the registry are made automatically by Windows 98 SE.
Windows 98 SE should try to restore a damaged registry, but in this
case I think it is not damaged, but instead has faulty settings. I
forget the procedure for restoring a backed up registry manually, but
it should be easily found with Google.

While in safe mode or from a DOS boot disk, if ZoneAlarm can't be
uninstalled, you could try to remove any vxd files or programs that run
at startup and belong to ZoneAlarm (which does have low level access to
the system), but that is a very complicated procedure.
Good luck. I hope this helps.

Thanks for the replies. She's going to try these suggestions, and I'll let you know what happens.

- Dugie
 
W

WebWalker

Any ideas as to what happened, or advice for her?

Sound like she need computer technical advice instead of freeware
suggestion.

If you she can boot to safe mode (press F8 before Windows splash
screen appear), ask her to uninstall the problematic ZoneAlarm.
 
D

Dugie

WebWalker said:
On Sun, 26 Dec 2004 21:51:06 GMT, "Dugie" <[email protected]>
Sound like she need computer technical advice instead of freeware
suggestion.

I think you're correct.
If you she can boot to safe mode (press F8 before Windows splash
screen appear), ask her to uninstall the problematic ZoneAlarm.

She tried this, and still hit the blue screen. Finally she did a clean reinstall of Win 98SE, lost all data.

Thanks for your suggestions!

- Dugie
 

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