SYSTEM.INI and WIN.INI Files.

Thank you for your kind reply.I read your reply 2/3 times,but few parts of your reply are not coherent with my question.There is few facts i would like to know which i mention below:

1. I restored my SYSTEM.INI and WIN.INI files,then I found everything was emptied on SYSTEM.INI and WIN.INI file tabs.I mean that there are tabs still right now,but the window is empty.Why it happened?
2. Are empty options of SYSTEM.INI and WIN.INI files are harmful for my system?

3.How can I rebuild those options again as

Thank you for your kind reply.I read your reply 2/3 times,but few parts of your reply are not coherent with my question.There are few facts i would like to know which i mention below -

1. I restored my SYSTEM.INI and WIN.INI files,then I found everything was emptied on SYSTEM.INI and WIN.INI file tabs.I mean that there are tabs still right now,but there are no contents.Why it happened?
2. Are empty options of SYSTEM.INI and WIN.INI files are harmful for my system?

3.How can I rebuild those options again, as previous state as when I reinstalled my C Drive?

                                                                                                     From,

                                                                                                              Wahidur Rahman.

The win.ini and system.ini files are supposed to be empty on a fresh installation.

Since they are just text files, you can open them with Notepad or WordPad.  If they are empty, the tabs in msconfig will be empty.  Even if the files have no contents they should still show up as tabs in msconfig.

No matter what I did I could not seem to recreate the situation where the tabs would not show up in msconfig though - they always showed up even when the files were not present so I don't know why that is.  I emptied the files, deleted the files but the tabs still show up in msconfig and I don't know why (I thought they would not show up).  Maybe somebody else can tell us why you might not see the tabs in msconfig.

I am not sure I get that - but you can ADD stuff to the files from msconfig so maybe that is why.

Why would the tabs not show up at all?  I don't know but maybe somebody else knows.

I know that if the boot.ini is missing, there will be no BOOT.INI tab.

My win.ini and system.ini files have a little stuff in them that are probably from installing third party programs over the years. 

My XP has been installed for almost 10 years so something I installed along the way may have needed to put parameters in those files - looks like some stuff for video compatibility and in the top of the win.ini file is this line:

; for 16-bit app support

But I can't tell what those programs might be or if I even have those programs are installed anymore...

I don't see how the files being empty could be harmful.  You might run into a problem if you try to use some program that needs to look in the files to get some parameters and doesn't find them, but I don't know what programs those might be.  If you have that problem, you would probably need to uninstall and reinstall that program.

On a fresh installation of XP the win.ini and system.ini files are present but empty.

In versions of Windows up to 3.x, the files could contain configuration information but then that information was moved into the registry.

These files may be populated with configuration data by the installation of third party programs or older programs that might still use them for backwards compatibility.

If the files are not present, you will not see the tabs in msconfig so that make sense.  XP doesn't use the files, but something else you may have installed might.

Just like if the boot.ini file is missing, there will be no BOOT.INI tab in msconfig.  In a single partition installation XP doesn't even need a boot.ini to boot. 

If the boot.ini file is missing, you will see a message like this:

*Invalid BOOT.INI fileBooting from C:\windows*

But XP will still boot just fine.  Non believers, try it!

When I see a missing boot.ini (and not BOOT.INI tab in msconfig), I am going to ask the question "Have you now or ever had installed the Ask Toolbar?" since the installation of the Ask Toolbar used to delete the boot.ini (and a few other things) but I think they have since fixed that.

Note that you can't edit these win.ini or system.ini files with msconfig.  You can move things around and enable/disable things that might be in there but you can't add or delete things but usually they are empty.

XP provides another System Configuration Editor tool called sysedit that when you run it (from Start, Run) will open the win.ini, system.ini, config.sys and autoexec.bat files all at once for editing.

So if your two files are not present, it makes sense that you will not see the tabs in msconfig.