I would like to get 'help and support' back on my XP machine, but this is proving difficult. I need to turn on the service, but it is not even listed in the services console (it goes from 'Health Key and Certificate Management Service' to 'HTTP SSL' with nothing in between. I have run sfc /scannow and rebooted with no joy. What now? [Bonus question: what happened to it? :-) ]
This is XP Profressional BTW
I don't know where I am going with this but, if you open up your control panel, on the left hand side there is a help and support button; is yours gone?
Yes, there is, but it still tells me I need to start the 'help and support' service. This service is nowhere to be found after opening services.msc from 'run'.
If I had the time I would check on the OS disk to see if there is file there to extract only that. Let me see what I can find.....give me a couple of hours (I am at work-not sure exactly when I can take the time!)
Give this a shot and see if it works.....Click Start, Run and type "%systemroot%\inf". Right-click the file PCHealth.inf file and choose "Install". Insert your XP CD when prompted. If you have a Service Pack installed, be sure to point to the %Windir%\i386\ServicePackFiles folder, or your slipstreamed XP CD (if available). Let me know what happens!
D@#$%@$# Microsoft! Er, sorry. It says that I need the Service Pack 3 CD! I am now trying to pull the file off my installation CD (which only has SP1a). Is MS even sending out SP3 cd's yet?
I am not sure if they are now or not...Is your system updated to SP3?
Yes it is. Also, I found a copy of the file PCHealth.inf on the web (couldn't find it on the installation CD) and I replaced mine with the new one (I did save the old one) and rebooted the machine. Still I cannot find 'help and support' under services.
Have you ran any registry cleaners lately, or since you lost your help and support feature?
Yes. But I have also tried doing a registry fix for this problem as I've seen outlined elsewhere. I have just found something (finally) from MS http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937055 which addresses this problem almost precisely except that it only seems to work for Server2003 and not for XP. Everything goes smoothly until I get to this part: run HSCUpd.exe -i hscmui.cab, which seem to apply only to server 2003
I am about to leave work...so keep me updated, and I will be back online tomorrow morning. I will not be leaving for a few more minutes, but I will check back for an updated post before I leave....Good Luck
The following at least has given me back 'help and support' in the services consol: 1. Open a command prompt.
2. Navigate to %windir%\PCHealth\HelpCtr\Binaries
3. Run this command:
start /w helpsvc /svchost netsvcs /regserver /install
4. Once this command completes the Help and Support service should now appear in services.msc
5. Start the Help and Support service
I still can't quite get help and support to actually open up yet, but this should go a long way to solving the problem. I need a nap!
Good work! Some progress is better than no progress....lets resume this tomorrow!!
Well, the point I am at now is: I have 'help and support' listed under services, it is started and set to automatic which sounds normal for this service. However. clicking Help and Support in the start menu just gives me the little hourglass, twice, for a short period and then it quits. No error messages however which I am guessing I would get if there was a problem with the path. I have tried the following 2 things one of which I think you recommended, but with no joy: oops. Can't copy and paste them. But one (yours I think) was a .vbs script and the other a .reg fix
I must say, it took me a while to figure out how to implement the .vbs file!
hi beep
try this,run msconfig and check the help and support box.if that fails download this zip file specially for your problem.
so how did it go?
hm, well, the fixwinXPhelp finds no problem to fix and run > msconfig just tells me that windows cannot find it (msconfig). going to run a search on it now.
do you mean when you typing msconfig in the run dialog box it responds with nothing?? if this is what you mean than theres more to your machine than just the help and support
so I am beginning to believe. I found a copy of msconfig from perfectdrivers and placed that in my system32 file. this doesn't seem to help. It might be useful to list some of the programs I use for utilities: Ccleaner, TuneUp Utilities 2008, AVG free 8.0, Adaware, spybot search and destroy, spyware blaster, and spyware guard.
Thanks to all for your help. The problem turned out to be worse than I had thought. When trying to update SP3beta to SP3, I found that I needed to uninstall the beta which I was planning to do any way. Turned out that I could not uninstall the beta because of something like the non-Unicode being set to a form of Bosnian(!?). and this wasn't even actually true. At this point I decided a full repair was in order and, so far, this has seemed to fix all my problems. It was interesting to find out how to restore a missing service though and I think I might have been able to help someone else with that particular problem. So at least it was a useful exercise!
I would mark this solved, but it seems more of a workaround than an actual solution.
so long as you dont have that prob anymore. hope to see you around
cheers
Experience is always a good thing....even if you don't find what your looking for! Have a great day!
Thanks to all for your help. The problem turned out to be worse than I had thought. When trying to update SP3beta to SP3, I found that I needed to uninstall the beta which I was planning to do any way. Turned out that I could not uninstall the beta because of something like the non-Unicode being set to a form of Bosnian(!?). and this wasn't even actually true. At this point I decided a full repair was in order and, so far, this has seemed to fix all my problems. It was interesting to find out how to restore a missing service though and I think I might have been able to help someone else with that particular problem. So at least it was a useful exercise!
I would mark this solved, but it seems more of a workaround than an actual solution.
I had already got as far as your previous post by trying various fixes in a similar fashion to your posts including manually restoring registry keys with regedit as well as the two posted fixes I found.
When I got to this stage I was able to uninstall SP3, which was not the beta version, but the full 300mb odd package form the techy MS site, shortly after it was released. This did not fix the problem - that is working with SP2, which previously worked fine. So I downloaded SP3 again, the smaller version from Windows Update. Installing this did not fix the problem, so I restored the system with a 6 month old backup, back to SP2 again, which was working perfectly well at the time, but Help and Support will still not open. It is shown as running on Services, but apart from the eggtimer coming up, nothing else happens. I'm not even getting the cryptic message saying that Help and support can't open due to another service being unavailable. I've turned on all the services I could from msconfig, but I now find that double-clicking on a service does nor open the control box, though they are all still running. I suspect this may be because I only have the reduced home version of Windows XP Media Centre?
I read your message above with interest and the 2 following ones hoping something more concrete would come up to fix this continuing problem. I use Help and Support infrequently, which is why I can't say that the problem is really due to SP3, it might be something daft that I've done. I should say I am not an IT expert, merely a punter whose been computing some long time. I would be interested to know how you did your 'full repair', if no one comes up with something less drastic. I wonder if it could be something to do with AnalogX controls - can't find where they are or check whether running properly.
As you can see, I'm struggling and would welcome any help!
I should have said ActiveX - not AnalogX:(
Well, I seem to have solved the problem in a not very elegant way. I found some advice at http://forums.techguy.org/windows-nt-2000-xp/259795-help-support-error.html
that put me on the right track, even though it was out of date.
I checked the pchealth.inf file in Windows/inf and found that 3 cab files were missing from Windows/pchealth/binaries. I tried typing in helpctr -regserver at Start/run and this seemed to put in 2 of the cab files, but I was still missing pchdt_w3.cab.
As I'm running SP3 and my installation disk (from Dell:( ) is SP2, rather than attempt an install, I copied the pchdt_w3.ca_ to the desktop and unzipped it to pchdt_w3.cab. I then moved this to the Windows/pchealth/binaries folder. Restarted the computer and much to my amazement the Help and Support box opened from the start menu.:-O
When ever I try to open Help and Support in the Window XP professional it gives the message as: Window cannot hopen 'Helpand Support' because a system service is not runnig. To fix the problem start the service named 'Help and Support'.
Will you please guide how to start the service named 'Hep and Support'. A detail reply is requested. Raz
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