'Windows 16 Subsystem' error etc.

[Guest]

Situation is as follows:

XPPro SP2

40 gig hard drive been running nearly full for several months before I could
get around to offloading pictures.

At one point, when I used fast user switching to access a second profile
while the first was still running, I got a message something like 'can't
find profile' and then the system started to build a new one before I could
stop it with the result that the Outlook.pst for that side was lost. (thank
heavens for Google desktop!).

I assumed this must be a glitch related to the too full drive, but, now I
have external drives for my pics and have been moving them and creating
space.

Last night I completed the transfers and ran CCleaner and Spybot on my side
then fast user switched to run the same on the other, only to find that same
'can't find profile' message pop up and begin to build a new desktop for it.

This time I quickly pulled the plug, and the profile was back to normal on
the restart, so it luckily had not had time to corrupt the pst file (I'd
made a copy of it though.)

After that I completed the running of CCleaner; Spybot and AdAware on that
side, and left the pc to defrag over night.

Today I was expecting to see some performance improvements, but I still
notice some odd effects.

Windows that I close remain as ghosts on the taskbar until I right click on
them and close them again.

When I try to open some programmes such as Oxford dictionary and thesaurus I
get a sequence of error messages culminating in there being a problem in the
'Win 16 Subsystem'.

Googling, I find various mentions of fixes for this but all relating to NT
Servers, and requiring NT discs to fix.

Can anyone explain what is going on?

Many thanks for any light that can be thrown on this.

Cheers,

S

 

[Peter Foldes]

See the following

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/16bit.htm

 

[Guest]

Thanks Peter.
That was very quick!
I'll get right on to it.

Regards,
S


See the following

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/16bit.htm

 

[Guest]

Now have gone through your link notes and deleted unnecessary or suspect
items from start up progs and done a full system scan with McAfee in safe
mode.

Also ran SpyBot in safe mode but AdAware would not run in that mode, giving
'EAccess violation' notices. It did run in normal mode though.

No viruses or other malware were detected, but I did have my dictionary
programmes back without invoking the '16 bit / NTVDM.exe' messages,
afterwards.
A pleasing result, but why would that be?

One of the 'suspicious' start up processs that I removed with SpyBot's start
up tracker, were a number of instances of 'ctfmon32'. SpyBot info seemed to
be rather ambivalent as to whether this was always spyware or sometimes
needed. Removing it from the start up list, I notice that one instance of
it has already returned on one of the plain numbered 'user accounts' that
seem to be part of the system.

Should I search for all ctfmon32 files and remove them?

Another puzzling finding is that running SpyBot's 'system internals' check,
it tells me that the registry has an entry:
HKEY_Local_Machine\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\AppPaths\Win32
Which points to a file which does not exist.
How can Win32 not exist?
Should I remove this entry?

Thanks for your help,

Regards,
S


See the following

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/16bit.htm