Help & Support results never visible

  • Thread starter Thread starter WinGuy
  • Start date Start date
W

WinGuy

I've been seeing an increasing occurence of this one problem on different
machines, both on clean and upgrade installs of XP-Home.

The symptom is that the result of any (yes, any) Help and Support search
returns absolutely no entries to highlight in the left column, and nothing
at all displayed in the right column. The screen layout is ok, though, and
no errors get reported. Searching the Index works fine, though. For example,
if click Start then Help and Support and then enter a search term in the
provided input box and do the search then no list to choose from occurs in
the left pane and nothing gets displayed in the right pane, regardless of
the search term that was entered. A repair reinstall (not a full new
install) does not fix the problem, only a full reinstall fixes but of course
that is not an acceptable solution in some cases.

Anyone got some ideas on how to correct this? Only thing I found regarding
this in the KB was 309431, but the "fix" is not directly downloadable, and I
think they're talking about an improper character set being displayed
instead of the complete lack of results that I'm talking about (the article
is not clear to me about what "unreadable" really means). :(
 
Thanks for the links, I'll try them out while waiting for response to an
incidence report (the copy of XP-P was purchased and installed clean less
than 60 days ago). :)
 
Okay

WinGuy said:
Thanks for the links, I'll try them out while waiting for response to an
incidence report (the copy of XP-P was purchased and installed clean less
than 60 days ago). :)
Click to expand...
 
Hi, Kaylene. Just a follow-up note to say I just got done trying ALL of the
things at the links that were given. Unfortunately, none worked (tested
after each apply) and several broke Help entirely and required re-install of
Help. The annoyance persists unchanged in any respect. Perhaps it was caused
by user tinkering of themes, icon spacings and sizes, and so on but I see no
way (even with classic desktop theme) to force everything back to
installation defaults and I've gone through it manually to assure no white
text on white background settings, and so on. Amazingly, my own System
Restore service checkpoint of 27th last month did *not* fix either the Help
problem nor the themes issue (!), neither of those problems had existed at
that checkpoint following the then 100% (reformatted) clean install of
XP-Pro and having applied all the then current MS obtainable updates.
Strange problem, I'm glad this installation is under warranty because I've
seen it several times before in the last 2 months and had to do complete
restoration in result (OEM products) and that's unprofessional. No text in
right pane after a search except for *online* results, scoll bars dimmed
out, and nothing in right pane exists to copy and paste to notepad after
highlighting any search result topic in the left pane. I strongly suspect
some new virus or trojan causes this, a possible "after affect" not being
cleaned up during infection removal. But I'm just not sure, no infections
have been found.
 
Thanks for posting back, as you say it's under warranty. Perhaps take it back.
All these problems in my opinion should not be happening on a clean install.

The only other thing I can think of is spyware/malware
Spyware Programs links:-
www.lavasoftusa.com Ad-Aware
www.security.kolla.de Spybot

If you suspect a virus, what about an online scan, some viruses disable your own
anti virus system
Perhaps an online security/virus check
Symantec
http://security.norton.com/sscv6/default.asp?langid=ie&venid=sym
Trend Micro House Call:
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
Panda ActiveScan;
http://www.pandasoftware.com/activescan/com/activescan_principal.htm
McAfee FreeScan:
http://us.mcafee.com/root/mfs/default.asp
Kaspersky Labs On-line Virus Checker:
http://www.kaspersky.com/remoteviruschk.html
BitDefender Online Scan:
http://www.bitdefender.com/scan/licence.php
 
Kaylene aka Taurarian said:
Thanks for posting back, as you say it's under warranty. Perhaps take it back.
All these problems in my opinion should not be happening on a clean install.

The only other thing I can think of is spyware/malware
Spyware Programs links:-
Click to expand...

Thanks for the list. Those utilities find nothing wrong. This problem is not
yet resolved, but it has moved up to Research status with Microsoft. Turns
out that it's an IE6 problem, many hours have been spent on the phone under
warranty. Could just reinstall WXP in total, but that is no guarantee that
the problem is truly solved and so the election was made to go for it until
the root cause is found. We've pulled every known trick in the known book so
far, with no affect whatsoever. I'll be posting back when the problem is
resolved. I do have to say that the expertise, manners, and troubleshooting
suggestions received from Microsoft techs has been very good. :)
 
A follow-up on the original post I used to open this topic. Approximately 2
weeks of working with Microsoft on this issue, which turned out to be a
problem with IE itself, and which involved about 12 hours of actual
telephone based troubleshooting over a 2 week period, resulted in no
solution and the problem was eliminated via doing a repair installation of
XP-Pro over itself (thereby replacing whatever system file/s that were at
fault but never identified). While this was ok for that particular retail
installation, the root cause of the problem was not solved. Although MS was
(reluctantly) willing to continue the troubleshooting without doing a repair
installation, after two weeks of time passing the customer was getting
irritated. I'd have liked to discover the real culprit, and in hindsight I
realize now that I should have first made copy of the entire windows folder
structure and then compared files after the repair reinstallation & after
having done all the updates etc. The information thereby obtained would have
been valuable in cases where a repair reinstall is not an option because of
XP being an OEM installation. :(
 
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