OLEAUT32.DLL Not Found...

[John]

Here's a strange one that occurred while I was travelling
lately. Our Dell 2400 with XP wouldn't allow anyone to log
on because it appeared to have lost OLEAUT32.DLL. First it
happened to one of the accounts (older daughter) and then
the rest. When I got home it kept asking me for a password
to log in even though I never had one. When ever we tried
to move past it we would get the message that OLEAUT32.DLL
was missing. We couldn't reinstall windows without
reformating the hard drive.

We pulled that hard-drive and installed XP on another hard
drive to get the computer up. I then put the original hard
drive back in as a second (non-booting) hard drive. At
first I feared that someone had allowed a virus on the
computer in spite of my up to date Norton Antivirus
protection. So once the computer was up I ran anti-virus
against the disk to ensure that nothing got through.
Nothing. Then I checked the disk condition using Norton's
Disk Doctor. Once again no issues. Then I did a search
for OLEAUT32.DLL and... found it on the disk! Huh???

Does anyone have a clue what happened and what I can do to
prevent this problem from reoccurring? Right now I'm in
the process of transferring all of the data from the old
disk to the new one and then I'll reformat the old disk to
make sure that if there are any hidden faults, that they
are wiped.

Any ideas?

 

[Kelly]

Hi John,

This generally has to do with the opening of second windows in IE and easily
cured by going to:

Start/Run and typing in: regsvr32 Oleaut32.dll

Dll's can have conflicts from time to time, depending on many issues. Not
really a great deal to be concerned with.