Windows has lobotomised itself
I must have recently made some rash claim like 'Windows Media Centre has been running absolutely fine for me for ages' because I am being punished for it with a vengeance. Sory for the long tale of woe, but it's got me really confused.
Wednesday night seemed normal - I installed some windows Updates, did a defrag, and installed a tool that failed to remove adverts from my recorded TV programs.
On rebooting, however, it was obvious that we had a problem. Windows took much longer than normal to boot, made no noises, and the start menu wouldn't pop up. Running applications didn't appear on the program bar at the bottom of the screen and minimising them caused them to minimise to a title bar in the bottom left of screen.
Internet Explorer would not do anything, Clicking on the Windows Update link didn't even try and start IE and Media Centre would just crash if you started it. Consistent error to do with missing dll calls.
Firefox still had internet access, bittorrents would still download and divx files would play (albeit it without sound) but anything that relied on built in Windows libraries failed either quietly or with a 'Send this error to Microsoft' error report.
'Aha!' thought I, 'I shall use windows restore to fix whatever horror Windows has inflicted on itself'. Useful error message 'Windows restore is unable to help protect your computer right now. Please reboot and try again'.
A couple of reboots, and some fruitless Safe Mode ramblings later I decided to see if some dodgy sdervices had started that were blocking every attempt from windows to be useful. the 'advanced' page of Services manager was broken but the simple page showed me the problem. About 25% of the vital Windows services were running. The big one missing (after a little googling) was the RPC service, on which pretty much all the other ones relied. Starting it by hand got me 'Access denied' and every suggestion I can find in the MS 'help' websites has no effect.
I've found a couple of other people with this exact problem on message boards. They all scrubbed and rebuilt. Before I do that does anyone have any suggestions of things I can try this evening? I suppose a repair install first might fix it without wiping out everything else that I have installed.
Ta all.
Uberlad
Wednesday night seemed normal - I installed some windows Updates, did a defrag, and installed a tool that failed to remove adverts from my recorded TV programs.
On rebooting, however, it was obvious that we had a problem. Windows took much longer than normal to boot, made no noises, and the start menu wouldn't pop up. Running applications didn't appear on the program bar at the bottom of the screen and minimising them caused them to minimise to a title bar in the bottom left of screen.
Internet Explorer would not do anything, Clicking on the Windows Update link didn't even try and start IE and Media Centre would just crash if you started it. Consistent error to do with missing dll calls.
Firefox still had internet access, bittorrents would still download and divx files would play (albeit it without sound) but anything that relied on built in Windows libraries failed either quietly or with a 'Send this error to Microsoft' error report.
'Aha!' thought I, 'I shall use windows restore to fix whatever horror Windows has inflicted on itself'. Useful error message 'Windows restore is unable to help protect your computer right now. Please reboot and try again'.
A couple of reboots, and some fruitless Safe Mode ramblings later I decided to see if some dodgy sdervices had started that were blocking every attempt from windows to be useful. the 'advanced' page of Services manager was broken but the simple page showed me the problem. About 25% of the vital Windows services were running. The big one missing (after a little googling) was the RPC service, on which pretty much all the other ones relied. Starting it by hand got me 'Access denied' and every suggestion I can find in the MS 'help' websites has no effect.
I've found a couple of other people with this exact problem on message boards. They all scrubbed and rebuilt. Before I do that does anyone have any suggestions of things I can try this evening? I suppose a repair install first might fix it without wiping out everything else that I have installed.
Ta all.
Uberlad
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