P
Pete B
As part of my adventure trying out the beta of the MS Spyware util, I encountered a system shutdown unusual event. Please bear with me while I try to describe what happened.
I was getting a popup error window during the shutdown, right before the screen went blank. It only appeared for about a half-second, and I never could read it but it was relating some kind of initialization error. It did not prevent the shutdown, it was just so quick as to be annoying and useless.
Not knowing any better, though, I thought it might be some kind of shutdown problem (it was actually caused by the beta software, but I had installed a few other apps after that). Foolish me, I went to my WinXP Pro Help and followed the troubleshooting instructions to analyze shutdown problems. The first suggested step was to use msconfig to disable all the system services and restart to try shutting down again to see if that cured it. I did that, no help either as I recall, but then (because using msconfig that way made me nervous) decided that since the problem only started after I installed the MS Spyware software and several other software apps after that, I would just go back to full operation in msconfig and remove that software using the cpl AR function in reverse order to see if it fixed it.
The other software apps (really just addins for MS Office and such) did not do it, so I was left with the spyware app. Here I decided to do a sytem restore to revert completely to the state before I had installed the spyware. Surprisingly, I found that the Sys Restore had lost all my previous restore states except those made on the day I was doing this msconfig stuff. I had had about two weeks or more of daily restore points available prior to using the msconfig disable stuff, I know because I had checked just before I started using msconfig. But all the daily restore points prior to yesterday had vanished with no warning, so I was stuck unable to remove the spyware except by the AR cpl method.
No problem with that, apparently, it did remove most of it except some menu changes I had made, so that is no big deal. And it cured the error window shutdown problem. What I would desperately like to know is if there is a way to somehow "restore" my vanished restore points. I have been using SysRes since WMe, and never had it act this way. It would always just drop the oldest restore point when a new on was added mostly. HDD space is definitely not the problem, and I have the SysRes app set to use the full 10% or whatever allocation, whcih it is nowhere close to.
So are my previous restore states forever gone, or is this sudden toss of old restore states into a trashcan wholesale some new revision of the way Sys Res operates in WinXP Pro? Or was it the msconfig disable of sevices that did the dirty work, if so it ought to be publicised?
Anybody know what happened?
Oh, and BTW my suggestion is to forget about the MS Spyware beta, it is not updated with new attacks being used and it causes many system error problems. I posted that opinion in the spyware beta forum.
I was getting a popup error window during the shutdown, right before the screen went blank. It only appeared for about a half-second, and I never could read it but it was relating some kind of initialization error. It did not prevent the shutdown, it was just so quick as to be annoying and useless.
Not knowing any better, though, I thought it might be some kind of shutdown problem (it was actually caused by the beta software, but I had installed a few other apps after that). Foolish me, I went to my WinXP Pro Help and followed the troubleshooting instructions to analyze shutdown problems. The first suggested step was to use msconfig to disable all the system services and restart to try shutting down again to see if that cured it. I did that, no help either as I recall, but then (because using msconfig that way made me nervous) decided that since the problem only started after I installed the MS Spyware software and several other software apps after that, I would just go back to full operation in msconfig and remove that software using the cpl AR function in reverse order to see if it fixed it.
The other software apps (really just addins for MS Office and such) did not do it, so I was left with the spyware app. Here I decided to do a sytem restore to revert completely to the state before I had installed the spyware. Surprisingly, I found that the Sys Restore had lost all my previous restore states except those made on the day I was doing this msconfig stuff. I had had about two weeks or more of daily restore points available prior to using the msconfig disable stuff, I know because I had checked just before I started using msconfig. But all the daily restore points prior to yesterday had vanished with no warning, so I was stuck unable to remove the spyware except by the AR cpl method.
No problem with that, apparently, it did remove most of it except some menu changes I had made, so that is no big deal. And it cured the error window shutdown problem. What I would desperately like to know is if there is a way to somehow "restore" my vanished restore points. I have been using SysRes since WMe, and never had it act this way. It would always just drop the oldest restore point when a new on was added mostly. HDD space is definitely not the problem, and I have the SysRes app set to use the full 10% or whatever allocation, whcih it is nowhere close to.
So are my previous restore states forever gone, or is this sudden toss of old restore states into a trashcan wholesale some new revision of the way Sys Res operates in WinXP Pro? Or was it the msconfig disable of sevices that did the dirty work, if so it ought to be publicised?
Anybody know what happened?
Oh, and BTW my suggestion is to forget about the MS Spyware beta, it is not updated with new attacks being used and it causes many system error problems. I posted that opinion in the spyware beta forum.