Hi all
I recently went on a bit of a cleanup mission on my machine. Its quite old now and was pretty bogged down with the usual ms rubbish. I switched to Firefox and Thunderbird, installed open office. And then uninstalled anything I could find that I wasn't using. At the end of the exercise I had freed up about 6 gig, and the system was looking clean and running faster. However some things appear to have been broken. It is an odd collection, the following are what I've found so far:
Now this smells like a corrupt registry, especially considering all the uninstalling I was doing. Sadly (and perhaps foolishly given microsoft's track record wrt stability) I had system restore turned off. Strange the collection of things that are missing, mostly tabs related to properties windows, can anyone see a common thread running through there? Something specific that is broken?
Now I read this thread about using the install CD to do a system repair, but I'm asuming that will mean reinstalling everything again. I understand that it supposed to maintain your installations, but I can't see anything working correctly without its registry settings... Besides apart from not being able to create network shares or see my network settings the system is running better than it has in ages.
So what I'm wondering is. If I were to uninstall sp2, would I be able to force a reinstall of sp2 and all the updates which followed it? And would these replace the OS files and registry settings? Has anyone out there tried this before?
Or have I overlooked a simpler way to go about this?
I recently went on a bit of a cleanup mission on my machine. Its quite old now and was pretty bogged down with the usual ms rubbish. I switched to Firefox and Thunderbird, installed open office. And then uninstalled anything I could find that I wasn't using. At the end of the exercise I had freed up about 6 gig, and the system was looking clean and running faster. However some things appear to have been broken. It is an odd collection, the following are what I've found so far:
- Sharing/Securty tab missing from folder properties
- add/remove programs in control panel doesn't work. (plays error sound but nothing happens, haven't found a log or event for this yet). Found a backup copy of appwiz.cpl created by an update that does work (corrupt file maybe?)
- Hardware tab is missing from system properties
- Network icon is missing from system tray. I can see the network connection on the network settings page but right clicking properties does nothing, can't view available wireless connections either. The connection is working though.
- Windows security icon in system tray is 'invisible'. ie it is in the tray, there is a space for it, but there is no visible icon there. right clicking brings up an empty context menu, double clicking opens the web site (how I know what it is...).
- Some text was missing from the network connections wizard.
Now this smells like a corrupt registry, especially considering all the uninstalling I was doing. Sadly (and perhaps foolishly given microsoft's track record wrt stability) I had system restore turned off. Strange the collection of things that are missing, mostly tabs related to properties windows, can anyone see a common thread running through there? Something specific that is broken?
Now I read this thread about using the install CD to do a system repair, but I'm asuming that will mean reinstalling everything again. I understand that it supposed to maintain your installations, but I can't see anything working correctly without its registry settings... Besides apart from not being able to create network shares or see my network settings the system is running better than it has in ages.
So what I'm wondering is. If I were to uninstall sp2, would I be able to force a reinstall of sp2 and all the updates which followed it? And would these replace the OS files and registry settings? Has anyone out there tried this before?
Or have I overlooked a simpler way to go about this?