problem with control panel loading.

[Guest]

whenever i click on control panel, the control panel appears for one second,
but then it disappears, kind of freezes for a couple seconds, refreshes my
desktop and toolbar and system tray, loads only my anti-virus icon in the
system tray (all the other programs' tray icon disappear, although they have
not closed) and closes all windows eplorer windows. i click it the second
time, and it does the same thing. the third time though, i am able to load
it. what is the problem? i have no viruses, i don't have sp2, windows xp pro,
512 ram, 2.8 cpu, 250 GB hd.

 

[Walter Clayton]

The shell is blowing off. Sounds like you have a corrupt control panel
member.

Most control panel members are in %windir%\system32 and they will have a
*.cpl suffix. The easiest way to proceed, relatively speaking, is do a
search in system32 for all *.cpl files. Double click on each to see if it
launches. If one fails, but not all, then that's probably the culprit.
You'll need to restore that particular member.

 

[Guest]

ok, my bthprops.cpl won't open, which is 'Bluetooth Control Panel Applet." i
have no idea what this is. what do you mean by restoring? would i have to
reinstall windows?

 

[Walter Clayton]

Bluetooth is a wireless communications protocol. Unless you have bluetooth,
it's not critical. However if you don't have bluetooth it won't open, which
is not the same thing as blowing off the GUI.

Let me rethink...

Lauch each cpl member and see if any actually fault the system. If you can't
locate it that way, then rename (do not delete) different members to see
what happens when you fire up the control panel. To keep track of things
simply change the suffix to *.cpb (should be safe).

 

[Guest]

well, none of them fault the system... i did, however, although i havent
tried all the other cpl's, when i change wuaucpl.cpl (automatic updates) to
wuaucpl.cpb, the control panel successfully loads. i've had this disabled,
so i was quite surprised... so should i just keep this as wuaucpl.cpb?

 

[Walter Clayton]

Interesting.

To confirm, rename back. If control panel fails to load again, then restore
it. You might not be using autoupdates, but there are times when the default
gets changed and you'll need to be able to get back into to change the
settings.