[Abram]

For economy, I've been running XP home on a Compaq pressario 2100 for about 10 years, with no memory upgrades. Malware protection is AVG.

Over the past month, memory usage increased during browsing with iexplorer 7 to the point of crashing games (fly or die go). I tried firefox 1.8, which seemed to work better at first, then it too would see increases of memory usage and slow game response.

I tried some on-line scans (eg panda) but they were taking hours due to the browser memory usage, so I gave up.

Yesterday I thought I would upgrade to explorer 8 to see if that would help. Since then on boot-up I get the message:

1)Explorer.exe: this application failed to start bcause normaliz.dll was not found. Re-instaling the application may fix the problem.

Running windows in safe mode causes the same problem, as does trying to return windows to the last known good configuration.

Attempting to run explorer.exe from the task manager gives the following message:

2)Windows Task Manager: taskmgr.exe - Unable to Locate Component. This application failed to start bcause ieutil.dll was not found. Re-instalaing the application may fix the problem.

After clicking on "OK" message 2) is repeated. Then after again clicking on "OK" then message 1) appears again.

Running firefox from the task manager produces the same repeated message 2), but then the browser opens, which is how I am able to connect currently.

I was able to run an OTL scan from task manager, but I couldn't find an otl.txt file, if it created one.


Memory usage while running firefox still climbs, but System usage, at 72M, is about half of what it was before this problem.

Do I have any option besides re-instaling XP from disc?

Thank you,
Abram

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Uninstall IE8, see if that fixes it. If not, do a System Restore to before you installed IE8.

If you've been running XP for 10 years and never reloaded it, this may be a good time to do a Clean Install after saving your data.

[Ztruker]

Uninstall IE8, see if that fixes it. If not, do a System Restore to before you installed IE8.

If you've been running XP for 10 years and never reloaded it, this may be a good time to do a Clean Install after saving your data.

[Abram]

Hi and thanks so much for the quick reply.

Because I only have task manager, I need to know the path and filename of any process to try. Did you mean me to try C:\WINDOWS\ieuninst.exe? When I run that from task manager I get the message usage: ieuinst.exe [/q] [/z] <inf file>, and it tells me q is quiet mode and z no reboot, but what is "inf file"? And what file would I run to do a restore from the task manager?

Saving my data is a great idea: I'm about to run out and by some media. I am able to reboot in safe mode with dos prompt so I could use dos. Is there a program I can download to copy from the task manager?

[Abram]

After the above I tried C:\WINDOWS\system32\Restore\rstrui.exe. It would not run.

If I do end up needing to do a clean install can I download the files? If I ever had the source CD it is at my home an hour drive from here.

[Ztruker]

What do you mean by "download the files"? Do you mean backup your personal data? If so, probably the easiest way is to use a Live Linux CD like Puppy.

See here: PUPPY LINUX - How to backup your data using, Windows Made Easy

[Abram]

Thanks for the advice! I successfully created the Puppy boot disc and copied my data to an external drive. In the guide it also mentioned being able to save them to CD/DVD, but I couldn't figure that one yet. Do I need another burner program that runs on Puppy? Or do I convert my files to iso?

Now to deal with the laptop: Hopefully I'll find the original XP CD when I return home tomorrow. Are there any options for repairing XP if I lack the CD?

Thanks again.

[Ztruker]

No other option. You need an installation CD or Recovery CD from the manufacturer.

Good work with Puppy though. If you've never used Linux before it can be a bit daunting. Glad to see you saved your data.