XP Home - No Services, DevMan, Network, Audio

[Bruce Vander Werf]

We recently started experiencing the following:

No audio
No network

Which led to discovering:

Device Manager is empty
Very few services are running (most are disabled)

What can I do to fix this (short of reinstalling)?

--Bruce

 

[Kevin]

Sounds very suspicious. Run your anti-virus software, after updating the
definitions. Use Spybot Search and Destroy, Pest Patrol, Ad-Aware and a
good firewall. If you boot into safe mode, can you get into Device Manager,
and if you can is it normal or mucked up? Do you have a reliable (oxymoron
there for sure) restore point to go back to?

 

[DE]

Also, I have seen this related to removing/reinstalling NAV. Have you
done anything in that respect, with different NAV versions?

 

[Kelly]

Hi Bruce,

Go the Start/Administrative Tools/Services. Scroll down to Plug and Play
Service and stop and restart it. Once done the Device Manager will populate
again.

More info and troubleshooting techniques: For Pro

Go to Start/Run and type in: mmc /a. Go to File and choose Add/Remove
Snap-in. Click Add then scroll down to Device Manager, Add. Save it to
devmgmt.msc in %windir%\system32.

To extract a fresh copy: Go to Start/Run/CMD and type in the command below:
(Substitute C and D accordingly).

C:\>extract d:\i386\devmgmt.ms_ c:\windows\system32
\devmgmt.msc

where d: is your CD rom Drive with your windows XP CD.
Whatever your CD rom drive letter is then substitute it in
the command line.

 

[Bruce Vander Werf]

As it turns out, the problem had everything to do with services. I set
all the services from 'disabled' to 'automatic', rebooted, and
everything came up as it should. I then compared with another Windows
XP Home installation and set some of the services to 'manual' to match
that installation. Everything appears to be working okay now.

Is there a master list anywhere of default services and whether they
should be set to 'manual' or 'automatic'?

Also, any idea as to what may have caused this massive service
disabling?

--Bruce

 

[DE]

Well, as I mentioned, I've seen this when NAV was removed & re-installed
in a different version; did you do anything like that?

-- DE

 

[Kelly]

Great, glad you have it sorted.