Hi, hoping someone might have some ideas? First thing this morning I'm rudely woken up by a telephone call from my mate, he's got computers problems and i'm the one he always comes to ;( Initially the issue is that he can no longer get online with his Acer 5920 running Vista laptop, its wireless connection complaining that there is insufficient connection (or words to that effect, I forget the exact error). He'd spoken to his ISP for about an hour with no luck and had carried out all the usual checks ( e.g. restarting the router). However when his ISP asked him to open up his device manager, vista complained that it couldn't, that it doesn't know what to do with the file and 'the file has no associations with it', which is rather weird. At this point his ISP gave up and I was brought in. So far I've deduced Until this morning the computer and internet connection had been faultless. Neither he nor anyone else had installed any new software or drivers recently. Virus software was up to date and working. When logged into the only account, which is an administrator, trying to run any admin tools, such as accessing the device manager, or even running chkdsk fail, either with the 'file association issue' or simply open and close immediately (chkdsk.exe). Checked file association's and vista still claims that .msc is associated with the Microsoft Management Console. However when booting into safemode with the same account, everything works as expected ( except for the internet connection even in safemode with networking, but that might be a different issue so not too worried for the moment). He can check out his devices (all ok apart from some InfaRed one which i got him to disable). He can run chkdsk and even access 'error checking' from the drive->properties->tools window (which would fail previously). A full error check on reboot detected no bad blocks or any other errors. Tried creating a new account with admin privileges, but that had the same issue, wouldn't run admin tools unless in safemode. So I've considered HD failure, but that now seems very unlikely. I've considered file corruption, but the files themselves are fine I've considered the admin account being corrupted but then why did it work in safemode? I've now got him backing up all work from the machine as the only option open to me now is firstly to try an OS repair and then a complete HD wipe and re-install. I'm hoping someone else might have some less radical steps to try first, or even recognise the exact nature of this issue. Although searching on google led me down a few interesting avenues, nothing has helped yet.

You know, Microsoft has their own message boards for this sort of thing. The probability of finding someone who knows how to help you would be much higher there.

Quote: Original post by capn_midnight
You know, Microsoft has their own message boards for this sort of thing. The probability of finding someone who knows how to help you would be much higher there.

Good point, although I had searched some MS boards/newsgroups it didn't occur to post on them as i'd have to sign up and i've always found Gamedev to be very repsonsive to all manor of questions. Guess I just prefer it here ;)

I have now signed up and posted on the most appropriate board I could find at MS (which wasn't as easy as it should have been). So i'll just wait and see which thread gets a (meaningful) reply first ;)

I'd say go through with your backing up and reformatting. A pain in the butt, yes, but it'll probably fix whatever is causing the problem.

That does sound pretty odd. I'd almost guess that it is some sort of virus/spyware or something, or the OS has somehow become corrupted.

Problem fixed, though not solved.

Managed to get system restore working in safemode (once he'd finished backing up his work, just in case) and got him to restore back to a version from the 20th. Have to say I wasn't really convinced it was going to fix the problem as it seemed so weird, but it did.

All admin tools and privileges are restored and best of all the internet connection started working too. McAFee complained about errors and appeared to have to re-download and re-install itself or something ( my mate wasn't too clear on what was going on) and after a restart everything was still working fine ;)

Afterwards I realised that during all our earlier tests he never once got that vista confirmation thing, UAC? Yet he is definitely not the type of user to even consider disabling it. After the machine was fixed he started to get the UAC popup again whenever accessing the device manager etc. He then told me he used to get this before the machine broke ( wish he'd mentioned it several hours earlier).

So it would appear the problem with running admin tools, may have been related to the system trying to run the UAC/popup and it being corrupt or damaged in some way I guess?

Did you examine the Event logs and/or the "Reliability History" (or whatever it's called in Vista - I'm currently on Win7 and it changed the name of the thing) for the date range in question?

It shows when applications are installed, crash, etc. I would look for any suspicious installations - perhaps some not-quite-compatible app adjusted some registry setting that screwed up UAC. If you find anything suspicious you could tell him to avoid installing that particular piece of software so that he doesn't re-break his machine.

(edit) Looks like it only reports SOME application installs.

Quote: Original post by Nypyren
Did you examine the Event logs and/or the "Reliability History" (or whatever it's called in Vista - I'm currently on Win7 and it changed the name of the thing) for the date range in question?

Yeah I tried to get him to go through the various event logs, but I think he was overwhelmed by the shear number of errors and cryptic descriptions. Whilst I could have quickly scanned several hundred events and pulled out anything 'of interest', he's just not computer literate enough, so in the end I gave up on that avenue.

Have you considered using Remote Assistance to look at the logs yourself?

just a quick question? you do know that vista has UAC? and you do know how it works? and you do know how to run anything that requires admin rights in vista?

if not, right now, start googling!