Window XP repair

Well, I got back from my trip, and dove head first into this. I got it working! I ran into a few additional issues, but by having HBCD, I was able to solve them. The system is now running well enough that I can use it for what I need to. I'll probably do some more tweaking later, but it works fine for now.

For what it's worth, I did think of something that may have had something to do with this problem, I was working on a project that required me to access files from a Mac formatted drive. I installed a program called Mac Drive 9. Everything worked fine at first, but then it started crashing. As soon as I got this system back up and running, I uninstalled it immediately. It's been fine since.

In any case, thank you so much for all your help! I've learned a lot.

Roger

I can't thank you guys enough for your help on this. I've been so busy with other stuff, I simply haven't had time to deal with it. I'm leaving town for Thanksgiving, but I'll get back to it as soon as I get back. We're really close. Frankly, I'm having fun with this. It's so great to know there are guys like you out there to help with these things! I'll be in touch.

That is quite a few seemingly unconnected problems of missing/corrupt files and I can't think of anything I have encountered before where there have been so many issues like that.  You can of course just keep replacing the files that XP complains about and maybe things will settle down eventually.

In situations like this, I would usually ask "If the system used to work properly, what do you think happened to it?"  Sometimes you can get a little more history/background about what led of to the incident.

browseui.dll is on the list of the 3498 files that Windows File Protection looks after so there should be a copy in the c:\windows\system32\dllcache folder (that is where Windows keeps copies of protected files).

I don't use Windows Live so not sure how to fix that, except perhaps uninstall/reinstall - if you can get past that, you might fix it later or just uninstall it for now.

Don't know why Windows would report the HDD as new hardware.

If you can boot to the desktop and see the background image/wallpaper but no icons, taskbar, etc. that usually means that explorer.exe is not running so see if you can press Ctrl-Alt-Del and get into Task Manager, check the Processes tab to see if you see explorer.exe as a running Process.  You can think of explorer.exe as being your desktop.  If it isn't running (or if you terminate it) you will only see your background image/wallpaper until you start it.

If you don't see explorer.exe as a running process, see if you can start it by clicking:

File, New Task (Run...)

In the Open box enter:

explorer.exe

Click OK and see how things look - or if it complains about something missing/corrupt and work on replacing any file reported until you can get explorer.exe to run.

If your CD/DVD drive is not working, does that mean you did not create a Hiren's Boot CD yet and boot on it?  If your motherboard supports booting from a USB port (like a thumb drive) you can put Hiren's on a thumb drive and boot Hiren's that way.  I have instructions on how to do both if needed.  You can look in your system BIOS or for a brief flash of a menu to press a certain key to choose your boot device (that is F11 for me).

Sometimes when Windows complains about missing files, it could be that the NT File System (NTFS) is somehow corrupted and Windows just can't find the files and you need to run a chkdsk with error correction (chkdsk  /r) to see if you can fix it but you are going to have to boot on something in order to do that (or you could run it from Task Manager on the next reboot) but it would be good if you can get Hiren's going so you can watch chkdsk run and see what it has to say.

Then you can use Hiren's to copy off to a thumb drive or external HDD any of your personal files (documents, images, etc.).

I dunno guys...  RogerFiets has made considerable progress but this is a lot of things to be going haywire and not knowing what led up to it or what else is going to come up later is a little disenchanting - but it may work out with all of us ganging up on it.

I am fully aware of what WFP does - and ways to defeat it. I made sure that WFP would not reinstate url.dll when I deleted it (and it didn't) and double checked it was not there after the successful boot (and it wasn't).

I never said that I expected IE work after the boot :)

I then "corrupted" it by copying a different dll (utildll.dll) to url.dll and the system still booted just fine. After the succesful reboot I checked that the bogus url.dll still had the same size as utildll.dll (and it did).

So I redid the experiment but used boot.ini instead like you did and, as you predict, I got the bad checksum BSOD. Apparently, although I know a fair bit about WFP I don't know everything about its mechanisms for doing it (but I'm getting there).

Please can you look at my last reply to Roger and maybe assist in the three areas where I have suggested that you might be able to?

My XP will boot if url.dll is missing but will not boot if it is "corrupt" and you will see this:

STOP: c0000221 {Bad Image Checksum}

The image url.dll is possibly corrupt.  The header checksum does not match the computed checksum.

I corrupted it by booting into the Recovery Console, making a copy of the good one and copying c:\boot.ini over the top of url.dll - and the boot.ini will not have the same checksum as url.dll.

Note that you can't do a good test of a missing file by just deleting it while XP is running for if it is one of the 3498 files that Windows File Protection cares about, WFP will just quickly and silently replace it and put a message like this in the Event Viewer log:

Event Type:    Information

Event Source:    Windows File Protection

Event Category:    None

Event ID:    64002

Description:

File replacement was attempted on the protected system file c:\windows\system32\url.dll. This file was restored to the original version to maintain system stability. The file version of the system file is 6.0.2900.5512.

So if XP is running, you may "think" you deleted it (or copied over the top of it with something to corrupt it), but almost before you can blink (and you will not see anything happen), Windows File Protection will replace it - if it is one of the 3498 files looked after by WFP.  That is what WFP does.  So all this kind of testing to recreate errors of missing/corrupt system files is best done in the Safe Mode or better yet the Recovery Console so Windows File Protection is not running, do your damage to corrupt or delete files of interest, then test/reboot to see how things look, then learn how to fix it without a genuine bootable XP installation CD.

So it is true that your system will boot just fine if url.dll is missing, but it is the Internet Shortcut Shell Extension handler so some things in your browser will not work - telnet addresses, links, shortcuts, email links and some other things that I did not fully explore but the error you will see looks something like this when the file is missing: