I had some minor trouble with this, mostly because I don’t know minutiae about Linux, so I needed some help. Making NTFS partitions automount makes life a bit easier, Continue reading
Category Archives: Computer Fixes
Windows XP Logon Woes (Maybe Vista too…)
Another fix I found last week – a tip really. If you have a Windows XP machine that, when you try to log on to any account in both normal and safe mode, immediatly logs off before giving you a desktop or icons, usually with the phrase “saving your settings” just before going back to the login screen, I have found the general cause of the problem is a broken User Init process.
I have found that in most cases either userinit.exe is missing/broken/corrupt or the registry is pointing to something other than userinit.exe and -that- file is missing/broken/corrupt.
To check, get access to the hard drive of the broken computer in “offiline mode” (i.e. remove it and attach it to another computer) and check inside the x:\windows\system32 folder (whatever drive letter and windows folder this particular drive is using) and make sure userinit.exe is there. If it is there, compare it aganst the copy on a working computer. If they don’t match, backup the one on the broken hard drive and copy the good one from the working computer to the broken one.
After that, try the registry. Load the “SOFTWARE” hive from the broken hard drive (x:\windows\system32\config\SOFTWARE) into regedit on the working computer and browse to LOADEDHIVE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ and make sure the userinit value on the right points to the proper path and filename for where userinit.exe is residing on the broken machine with a COMMA after the pathname (usually “C:\windows\system32\userinit.exe,”)
Unload the hive, disconnect the hard drive, reattach to “broken” computer and see what happens.
Windows XP – Odd Network Fix
This is a weird problem I encountered a week ago and thought I would share it. Apparently, some security software was removed from this person’s computer and it broke the network stack. It was McAfee I believe. In any case, here were the symptoms:
- No network adapters were listed in the Task Manager -> Networking tab
- An
ipconfigresulted in a blank listing – just “Windows IP Configuration” and no numbers or adapters shown - In the device manager, all network items have the “Yellow Exclamation point”, and they have a hyphen “-” after their names
- WAN Miniport (IP) was also listed in the same manner
Here’s how I fixed it:
- Make sure Device Manager is closed
- open regedit, find the following folder, back it up then delete it
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\Root\MS_PASSTHRUMP
- Go back into device manager and remove all network adapters
- do a device refresh… or reboot.
That fixed the problem for me. Hopefully this helps someone else!
AVG 8 + Vista SP1 = Poor Network Performance
My computer was having random network peformance issues. If I ran the machine for a while, network transfers would cause my machine to hiccup and slow way down. Rebooting the machine fixed the problem. I thought this was due to a bogus network card, as has happened to me before using this model of motherboard, so I popped in a different network card and that solved the problem… for a while. Continue reading