Need advice on fix or upgrade

[Menno Hershberger]

I have a computer in that a customer brought to get "cleaned up". It's
Windows 2000 Professional with SP4 installed. He also is interested in
upgrading it to XP. It was full of several variations of the
Backdoor.Trogan virus and racked up 3,459 critical objects with AdAware.
Also ran the About:blank fix, Spybot, Pest Patrol, The Cleaner,
A square. I installed AVG to clean the viruses. Now I only have one
problem left that is stumping me. Clicking on Add/Remove programs does
absolutely nothing... not even an error message.
I Googled and came up with:
regsvr32 mshtml.dll
regdvr32 shdocvw.dll -i
regsvr32 shell32.dll -i
No help
Tried sfc /purgecache and sfc /scannow, but both of those keep telling me
that I have the wrong CD. But it isn't.
I also read that reinstalling Internet Explorer has been known to fix the
Add/Remove problem. I would be willing to try this if someone can explain
just *how* to reinstall it without being able to go in to Add/Remove
programs in the first place.
Lastly, at this point, would it be safe to just go ahead and upgrade
it to XP? It's a NoName with a 1.6 Ghz processor and 256 Mb of ram, so it
should be able to handle it. Needless to say, the guy doesn't want to
lose any of his applications or data, so he's favoring an upgrade over a
clean install.
I have already mirrored his drive onto a spare drive just in case of a
disaster...
Opinions appreciated!

 

[Yor Suiris]

Yes a reinstall of IE solved my problem with Add/Remove Programs. All you
have to do is run the setup.exe file.
You do not need add & remove, to install a program. It is getting it off
that is a problem with out it
As to your clients machine, with that many viruses/trogans and Adware I
would lean towards a format and fresh install. Chances are the upgrade wont
catch/save everything anyway. The lost of some of his stuff will MAYBE make
him think about protecting his machine in the future. Oh, then maybe
your/our business need more people like him to make more work and money for
all of us. ;-)

 

[Menno Hershberger]

Well, the IE (re)install didn't work. So I decided to try an upgrade to
XP. Everything went lovely for a little bit and then a blue screen with
"Setup cannot locate the Windows installation you want to upgrade".
That's covered in article Q242066. I checked the obvious stuff and it
looked OK, so going further would have been complicated. Like making a
boot disk, fabricating your own boot.ini (which looked right to me
anyway). Hard to make a boot disk when I imagine the option is in
Add/Remove Programs...
So I did it your way. Called him up and said I could save all his
documents, favorites, mail, etc. He went for it and I'm doing a clean
install of XP. I just heard music from the shop, so it must have found
the sound card at least....
Thanks for your suggestions!

 

[Enkidu]

It's a rule of thumb that an upgrade never solves problems. Only
perform an upgrade on a system that is runnignwell.

Cheers,

Cliff