J
Jonty R P
Clear DayHi all,
I have seen some messages relating to this problem, but so far no suggestions as to how to resolve this problem. Hence I'm posting this as a new topic again.
I recently installed SP2 on to my Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop. I did a clean install of SP2 using a slipstreamed CD I have created from the original Win XP Pro Installation CD. I had to do this as I had run into several problems with trying to do an upgrade over my Win XP Pro SP1 system, and eventually ended up with an unusable system! So I know there are no conflicts with the previous installation of Windows, as I wiped the HDD clean before starting the new installation.
My system is a P-III M @ 933Mhz with 512Mb RAM and a 60Gb Hitachi Travelstar (7,200 rpm) HDD. The Video adapter is an nVidia GeForce 2Go with 32Mb VRAM. All the Dell specific drivers are the latest available and according to Dell are all SP2 compatible.
The problem I'm having is with the Start Menu crashing. Every so often the left pane of the Start menu goes black and then the shortcuts on the right side pane also stop working. For instance if I click on the RUN command when this happens I get a spurious error message saying 'Windows can not create a shortcut here, would you like to create one on the Desktop'! Also when this has happened Internet Explorer and Outlook Express seem to lock up when I try to connect to the Internet and stop responding.
The only way I have found to 'cure' this problem is to either log off my user account, or reboot the computer. By the way my User Account has full administrative privileges, though it is not the in-built Administrator Account. On restarting my User Account, after the Start Menu has 'crashed', I then loose all the toolbars that I've set up on the Taskbar. I have the Quick Launch, the Address bar, Control Panel and Windows Media Player all setup on Taskbar, but these all disappear after the Start Menu crash. I have to then manually re-apply these Toolbars to get them back. Another thing that happens on restarting is that all my Desktop icons get re-arranged into a random order.
All this started to happen before I installed any extra programs, or even the Dell specific drivers. It basically began right after the clean install of SP2. As time goes on this seems to be happening more frequently. It's at a point now where every time I start the system, from cold, the Start Menu 'crashes' and I have to log off and log back on to get it to work right. It will then, for no obvious reason 'crash' again while working in Windows. I haven't been able to see any pattern to this, or any obvious trigger for this behaviour.
Any thoughts or suggestions as to what to do to stop this happening would be most appreciated. I am the Technical Support Director for a non-profit volunteer organisation and am responsible for upgrading all our systems to SP2 as soon as possible, but until I can figure out what is going on with my own system I am reluctant to risk upgrading other peoples systems!
Yours Faithfully,
Jonathan.
PQSA Network.
I have seen some messages relating to this problem, but so far no suggestions as to how to resolve this problem. Hence I'm posting this as a new topic again.
I recently installed SP2 on to my Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop. I did a clean install of SP2 using a slipstreamed CD I have created from the original Win XP Pro Installation CD. I had to do this as I had run into several problems with trying to do an upgrade over my Win XP Pro SP1 system, and eventually ended up with an unusable system! So I know there are no conflicts with the previous installation of Windows, as I wiped the HDD clean before starting the new installation.
My system is a P-III M @ 933Mhz with 512Mb RAM and a 60Gb Hitachi Travelstar (7,200 rpm) HDD. The Video adapter is an nVidia GeForce 2Go with 32Mb VRAM. All the Dell specific drivers are the latest available and according to Dell are all SP2 compatible.
The problem I'm having is with the Start Menu crashing. Every so often the left pane of the Start menu goes black and then the shortcuts on the right side pane also stop working. For instance if I click on the RUN command when this happens I get a spurious error message saying 'Windows can not create a shortcut here, would you like to create one on the Desktop'! Also when this has happened Internet Explorer and Outlook Express seem to lock up when I try to connect to the Internet and stop responding.
The only way I have found to 'cure' this problem is to either log off my user account, or reboot the computer. By the way my User Account has full administrative privileges, though it is not the in-built Administrator Account. On restarting my User Account, after the Start Menu has 'crashed', I then loose all the toolbars that I've set up on the Taskbar. I have the Quick Launch, the Address bar, Control Panel and Windows Media Player all setup on Taskbar, but these all disappear after the Start Menu crash. I have to then manually re-apply these Toolbars to get them back. Another thing that happens on restarting is that all my Desktop icons get re-arranged into a random order.
All this started to happen before I installed any extra programs, or even the Dell specific drivers. It basically began right after the clean install of SP2. As time goes on this seems to be happening more frequently. It's at a point now where every time I start the system, from cold, the Start Menu 'crashes' and I have to log off and log back on to get it to work right. It will then, for no obvious reason 'crash' again while working in Windows. I haven't been able to see any pattern to this, or any obvious trigger for this behaviour.
Any thoughts or suggestions as to what to do to stop this happening would be most appreciated. I am the Technical Support Director for a non-profit volunteer organisation and am responsible for upgrading all our systems to SP2 as soon as possible, but until I can figure out what is going on with my own system I am reluctant to risk upgrading other peoples systems!
Yours Faithfully,
Jonathan.
PQSA Network.