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Programs won't start
On 02/23/12 08:05 pm, Joe Morris wrote:
"Percival P. wrote: On 02/23/12 06:21 am, Joe Morris wrote: [system will not run a .exe file...] [snippage] OK. I've tried again from the command prompt after booting the WinVista installation disk, and the registry settings all seem fine. Is there something else that would prevent execution of .exe files and that could be fixed easily? E.g., an essential file has been deleted or renamed? The restore-from-a-backup feature does not recognize the three CDs as a valid backup set -- which does not surprise me. They contain a bunch of .zip files of the specified date in various subdirectories, but I suspect that they contain only a backup of his data files at that date. The restore-from-a-backup feature is expecting the backup to be on DVDs or an external drive. Sorry...no ideas at this time that are practical across a newsgroup. When something like this turns up at the office I'll make a best-effort attempt to find a problem - usually involving my remoting into the machine (or, for Certain People, an on-site visit) - but if nothing turns up I toss the ticket back to the help desk to have them schedule a reimage of the user's machine. The times I've seen your symptoms the systems involved were WinXP and the .exe and/or exefile entries had been corrupted by the user messing around with the associations dialog. In a business world triage is necessary, and getting the end user back to work is a high priority. There may yet be a simple explanation and fix for your problem; perhaps someone else among the newsgroup readership has a suggestion? I gave up trying to restore the computer to its pre-virus state and restored it to its factory-fresh state -- after making two separate backups to different external drives of my own. I hooked it up to our wired LAN so that I would not have to enter any SSID and password info, and let it get all the updates. The first round was about 110 important updates, but it had to reboot a few times before it was done with those. Then I let it install the recommended updates (17 of them, IIRC), did another backup to an external drive, shut the machine down, and went and did other things. When I fired it up again the next time, it wanted to install FP2, which (it informed me) included all previous fixes, and I let it do so. I did yet another backup and shut down, at which point it informed me that it had yet another 39 updates to install before it actually switched off. I then installed Microsoft Security Essentials and Macrium Reflect Free and attached the image I had made of the infected partition as a browsable drive with its own drive letter. As I was restoring his original user and program files from the backup to a separate folder, MSE found and deleted four instances of malware. I then did yet another backup. I've recommended that the student buy himself an external hard disk -- not a good time to do so, I know, because of the Thailand floods and consequent price rises -- and make full backups from time to time. I left his account as non-administrator, and I must remember to advise him against making it a an administrator account. Thanks again for your help, Joe. Perce |
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Programs won't start
On Feb 23, 5:21*am, "Joe Morris" wrote:
"Percival P. Cassidy" wrote: On 02/22/12 07:25 pm, Joe Morris wrote: [system will not run a .exe file...] [snippage] I can see the problem with the registry by comparison with the extracts Joe Morris posted in reply to my original message, but since no programs will run, I cannot use regedit to try to fix the problem. Do you have, or can you borrow, an installation disk for either Vista or Windows 7? *We won't be installing anything from it, but it can give you the tools to inspect and edit the Registry. (Incidentally...if you can see the Registry settings, what tool are you using that can't edit them?) snip OK, I haven't yet tried your instructions that follow, but I think what I did comes close: I booted from a WinPE-based Macrium Reflect recovery CD, went to the command line and executed REGEDIT. I could see that the only thing under HKLM/Software/Classes/.exe was the Default. I then created the new Keys and values that you quoted me earlier and exited REGEDIT, but the new values did not seem to "stick." (I thought that any changes were saved automatically on exit, and I didn't know about the [UN]LOAD HIVE command.) What REGEDIT displays by default is the Registry for the system that was booted...so you were looking at, and editing, the settings for the WinPE system. *Since it's on a read-only optical disk, they survived only until the machine was rebooted. *Editing a hive from a read-write disk, OTOH, results in persistent changes...regardless of whether you fat-fingered a change. Note that WinPE is a *very* stripped-down vesion of Windows, so it's missing (or has different Registry settings for) many of the settings you expect to find in a full installation. #include DireWarningsAboutRegistryEditing.h What the load/unload hive function does is to graft another (non-booted) system's Registry components onto the display of the booted system's Registry. *(And it's a bit more complex than that, since HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE is actually a merger of several separate hives...look at the contents of C:\Windows\System32\Config .) I'll try your most recent instructions and report back. Again, good luck. Joe HOW IS YOUR MALE VAGINA DOING JOE MORRIS? THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO PEOPLE WHO REFUSE TO OBEY THE FACT THAT THE THREAD HAS BEEN CLOSED! JUST FYI! THREAD REMAINS CLOSED! |
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Programs won't start
On Feb 23, 11:58*am, "Percival P. Cassidy"
wrote: On 02/23/12 06:21 am, Joe Morris wrote: [system will not run a .exe file...] [snippage] I can see the problem with the registry by comparison with the extracts Joe Morris posted in reply to my original message, but since no programs will run, I cannot use regedit to try to fix the problem. Do you have, or can you borrow, an installation disk for either Vista or Windows 7? *We won't be installing anything from it, but it can give you the tools to inspect and edit the Registry. (Incidentally...if you can see the Registry settings, what tool are you using that can't edit them?) snip OK, I haven't yet tried your instructions that follow, but I think what I did comes close: I booted from a WinPE-based Macrium Reflect recovery CD, went to the command line and executed REGEDIT. I could see that the only thing under HKLM/Software/Classes/.exe was the Default. I then created the new Keys and values that you quoted me earlier and exited REGEDIT, but the new values did not seem to "stick." (I thought that any changes were saved automatically on exit, and I didn't know about the [UN]LOAD HIVE command.) What REGEDIT displays by default is the Registry for the system that was booted...so you were looking at, and editing, the settings for the WinPE system. *Since it's on a read-only optical disk, they survived only until the machine was rebooted. *Editing a hive from a read-write disk, OTOH, results in persistent changes...regardless of whether you fat-fingered a change. Note that WinPE is a *very* stripped-down vesion of Windows, so it's missing (or has different Registry settings for) many of the settings you expect to find in a full installation. #includeDireWarningsAboutRegistryEditing.h What the load/unload hive function does is to graft another (non-booted) system's Registry components onto the display of the booted system's Registry. *(And it's a bit more complex than that, since HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE is actually a merger of several separate hives...look at the contents of C:\Windows\System32\Config .) I'll try your most recent instructions and report back. Again, good luck. OK. I've tried again from the command prompt after booting the WinVista installation disk, and the registry settings all seem fine. Is there something else that would prevent execution of .exe files and that could be fixed easily? E.g., an essential file has been deleted or renamed? The restore-from-a-backup feature does not recognize the three CDs as a valid backup set -- which does not surprise me. They contain a bunch of .zip files of the specified date in various subdirectories, but I suspect that they contain only a backup of his data files at that date. The restore-from-a-backup feature is expecting the backup to be on DVDs or an external drive. Perce HOW IS YOUR MALE VAGINA DOING PERCIVAL P. CASSIDY? JUST FYI! THREAD REMAINS CLOSED! |
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Programs won't start
Groundhog Gus wrote:
Don't know how Dell works, but I have an HP with Vista Home Premium. Instead of a disc supplied by the manufacturer, your disk should be partitioned into a C: and a D:. The D: drive should also have system saved files on it. If you know the DATE that 'no .exe' happened, then it might be simple for you. If not, you'll either have to edit the the registery or completely rebuild the C: drive. Try this, when you first boot up the system, you should have which Function key to press to do a system recovery. On mine it's F11. Keep pressing it until you get the recovery screen. Then on the screen select ADVANCED. It should show you a list of files you can recover. Select the one that dates BEFORE you know the 'no .exe' error occured and let the system do it's thing. The great part of the ADVANCED option is it will restore the system files to that date and ONLY the system files. Any of your regular files will not be changed. It takes about 15 minutes and saves you a hole lot of work. This option has saved my butt many times. It's worth a try. Sounds exactly like the results from the XPantivirus 2011 thing that infected my machine. I finally found a patch to run which corrected the settings so it would work again. Can't tell you offhand where I found it. |
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Programs won't start
Bob F wrote:
Groundhog Gus wrote: Don't know how Dell works, but I have an HP with Vista Home Premium. Instead of a disc supplied by the manufacturer, your disk should be partitioned into a C: and a D:. The D: drive should also have system saved files on it. If you know the DATE that 'no .exe' happened, then it might be simple for you. If not, you'll either have to edit the the registery or completely rebuild the C: drive. Try this, when you first boot up the system, you should have which Function key to press to do a system recovery. On mine it's F11. Keep pressing it until you get the recovery screen. Then on the screen select ADVANCED. It should show you a list of files you can recover. Select the one that dates BEFORE you know the 'no .exe' error occured and let the system do it's thing. The great part of the ADVANCED option is it will restore the system files to that date and ONLY the system files. Any of your regular files will not be changed. It takes about 15 minutes and saves you a hole lot of work. This option has saved my butt many times. It's worth a try. Sounds exactly like the results from the XPantivirus 2011 thing that infected my machine. I finally found a patch to run which corrected the settings so it would work again. Can't tell you offhand where I found it. This could be a good start. |
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Programs won't start
Bob F wrote:
Groundhog Gus wrote: Don't know how Dell works, but I have an HP with Vista Home Premium. Instead of a disc supplied by the manufacturer, your disk should be partitioned into a C: and a D:. The D: drive should also have system saved files on it. If you know the DATE that 'no .exe' happened, then it might be simple for you. If not, you'll either have to edit the the registery or completely rebuild the C: drive. Try this, when you first boot up the system, you should have which Function key to press to do a system recovery. On mine it's F11. Keep pressing it until you get the recovery screen. Then on the screen select ADVANCED. It should show you a list of files you can recover. Select the one that dates BEFORE you know the 'no .exe' error occured and let the system do it's thing. The great part of the ADVANCED option is it will restore the system files to that date and ONLY the system files. Any of your regular files will not be changed. It takes about 15 minutes and saves you a hole lot of work. This option has saved my butt many times. It's worth a try. Sounds exactly like the results from the XPantivirus 2011 thing that infected my machine. I finally found a patch to run which corrected the settings so it would work again. Can't tell you offhand where I found it. This could be a good start. http://www.malwareguides.com/xp-anti...val-guide.html |
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