Path Statement Not Working... Ping and Telnet and Tracert Missing

[Fresh Kist]

Hi Group...

On my Dell laptop running W2K Pro Sp4 I am all of a sudden no longer able to
run PING or TELNET or TRACERT (and a bunch of other stuff) unless I cd to
the WINNT\SYSTEM32 first. I have checked the path statement and both
C:\WINNT\System32 and %SystemRoot%\System32 in there. Also, nothing has
changed. It just seems to have forgotten.

Has anybody seen this? Any idea how to fix it?

Thanks for the help!

 

[Mark V]

Herb Martin wrote in

It is silly to have both (just slows down each request.)
Remove the explicit one (C:\winnt\....)

But that's not your problem.

At the command prompt type Set, or "Set P" (no wildcard, just
"P") or Path and inspect the path actually in use.

Watch out for missing ";" semi-colons or some other weird
character.

Make sure the drive letters and path are REALLY correct -- I have
had multiple loads of the OS on a machine where one path said, D:
and the other was C: but the path statements were wrong.

And if (at a cmd prompt) you actually see "%something%" then it is
possible the registy valuename is REG_SZ instead of the expected
REG_EXPAND_SZ.

 

[Ritchie]

And if (at a cmd prompt) you actually see "%something%" then it is
possible the registy valuename is REG_SZ instead of the expected
REG_EXPAND_SZ.

IMHO this is the most common cause of broken paths. And in-house
Visual Basic 'programmers' are to blame everytime. Seems they
weren't aware of the difference when they volunteered to automate
the rollout of software package xyz.

 

[Mark V]

Ritchie wrote in

IMHO this is the most common cause of broken paths. And in-house
Visual Basic 'programmers' are to blame everytime. Seems they
weren't aware of the difference when they volunteered to automate
the rollout of software package xyz.

Ah hah! Thanks. I knew this was likely an installer error, but did
not realize the VB connection. I assume the method is something like
read the key and contents
delete the key
create the key (with the wrong type!)
...

 

[Herb Martin]

Ah hah! Thanks. I knew this was likely an installer error, but did

not realize the VB connection. I assume the method is something like
read the key and contents
delete the key
create the key (with the wrong type!)

Well, that would be (even more) exceptionally egregious
for an installer to DELETE a needed key on a machine.

At most, the installer should update the key with the added
value, leaving everything else intact.

We used to see such trash in DOS install programs which
screwed up the "autoexec.bat" or "config.sys" files.