Nothing Works

[Nom D. Plume]

I'm trying to help someone over the phone that lives 5 states away.
The situation, as near as I can tell, is this. Her OS is Win XP Home
Edition. She recently uninstalled Norton AV 2002 and installed Norton 2006.
Immediately after that, it appears that nothing works on her computer. It
boots OK, but she gets zero response when trying to run programs on the
start menu. I'm trying to avoid doing the repair routine from the
installation disk as she is on dial-up and reinstallation of all the MS
updates would take forever.

As I said, nothing works from the start menu, so here is what we have tried,
to no avail:

Tried to restore to last known good configuration from the options available
from an F-8 reboot Nothing.

Windows explorer is available via right click from the start button, so I
had her locate the system tools menu in the all users profile. It was
empty.

From the "run" option, drilled down to windows/system32/restore/rstrui.exe.
She got a prompt saying something like "no program registered to run this
file".

Via windows explorer, we drilled down to the same program. The intial
screen came up, then nothing.

The control panel icon was available on the start menu, but the panel
wouldn't open. I had her open "my computer" on the desktop. It was
completely empty. We opened the control panel by going through windows
explorer. The panel opened. With the idea of creating a new user (thinking
her user profile might be corrupted), I had her go to "user accounts". It
opened, but then failed to respond when we tried to create a new acount.
The option wouldn't open.

As an after thought, I'm having her run SFC from the command prompt, but I
don't have the results yet.

One more thing that seemed strange. When I had her right click on the start
button, the only options she had were "explore all users" and "open all
users"


Does anyone have any suggestions? Remember, this is via the phone and not
hands on, so I don't have much more information than this at the moment.

TIA

 

[Mike Hall \(MS-MVP\)]

You have set yourself an impossible task.. your friend should get somebody
local to extract anything important from the drive, and then start over.. to
save important stuff, the drive should be installed as a slave in another
computer, and your friend should be there to advise on what or not to keep..
then refit into the home computer, and do a clean install of XP..

Advice for your friend.. DO NOT re-install anything Norton..

 

[Bob Gruett]

Another thought here: I don't know what exactly the second Norton package
contained, but if it was another version of their antivirus utility, you may
want to mention to your friend that it's a REALLY bad idea to install
multiple antivirus utilities side-by-side, even if they are the same brand.
In a nutshell, each will be monitoring the other's access to the boot
sector, which will result in (A) skyrocketing CPU usage, and (B) the
possibility of both programs producing many false positive viral detections.

Generally speaking, you want to uninstall the old A/V program before
installing the new.

-Bob

 

[Nom D. Plume]

She was going from Norton AV 2002 which is no longer supported to NAV 2006.
She says she did an uninstall, reboot, than install and reboot.

I haven't talked to her since last night. She was going to try to get
online with her browser. IF she was successful, I asked her to go to
logmein.com and download their program. I've had good success using that to
assist others. She can take her computer to a friend with cable internet
and I might be able to logon and "drive" her system from there. If so, then
I can save her email, docs, address book, etc and she can do a complete
reinstall. Hopefully, she still has all the necessary info to setup her
dial-up and POP/SMTP settings. I was hoping it wouldn't get to that point.

 

[Mike Hall \(MS-MVP\)]

Internet connection setup can be done over the telephone with the ISP.. that
is the least of any impending problems..