Hi there;
started pc this morning and the start menu and quicklaunch toolbar are inactive. They are present and visible as normal, but have no functionality. I'm running Symantec antivirus and also Iolo system mechanic 6 prof. System mechanic tells me my registry is OK but I suspect it might have done something to cause the problem. Can't run System restore because I don't know how to start it without the start menu.
any thoughts?
Paul B
I'm going to bet that you do not have a rclick context menu option to open command prompt for files and folders .... am i correct? And it's such a useful thing to have, as you are probably thinking right now, cos from the command prompt window you can do almost everything, including run System Restore.... heh heh....
So we better get you one....
Open an explorer window from my docs icon, whatever... got to tools > folder options > file types. Scroll down and select (NONE) /folder. Press Advanced, press New, and in the Action block type Command Prompt, in the App box type cmd.exe
OK and Apply your way out.
Now rclick a docs type folder eg My Docs, and Presto!! in the context menu you should see Command Prompt as a menu item. Now this is a cool thing...... note that the window opens in the folder/file that you rclicked..... this thing is so cool that you should KEEP IT.
Okay. Now in that Command Prompt window type this command and enter it...
%systemroot%\system32\restore\rstrui.exe
See? Told you this was a cool thing.
Hey, that's pretty cool!!
I found that system mechanic was at fault, and managed to restore my registry settings using the program. Has anyone else had problems with system mechanic? I'm worried about what happens the next time I run it.
Thanx for the prompt reply, and the geat technique for adding right mouse-click shortcuts to the menu.
Paul B
nope, i know nothing about that pg. had a squizz at the website and.... well, to be honest that sort of pgm scares me.... what control do you have over all those fixes and tuneups and optimizers and cleaners and defraggers? memory defrag??? Skip registry cleaning and optimizing... your registry is prob 25 - 30MB, scraping out a couple of lost or orphaned entries won't speed up things measurably. If anything is truly malicious in there but points to a genuine "bad" file then no cleaner will pick the entry up as bad, because simply put, the entry is doing its job. Cleaning the registry is akin to snipping a couple of blades of grass from your lawn. Sure, like every file it can get fragmented a bit... A lot of popular tweaks are dodgy, like clearing out your prefetch file [ doing that is guaranteed to slow down your puter until it eventually recreates all those entries that it uses]. And ur firewall has a popup blocker as part of it, and remove spyware? from a cd? you need regular updates for that. But as i pointed out, i know nothing about that pgm. Up to you. did it cause a problem for you? then think it thru.
And get Spywareblaster and CCleaner - configure the latter to do what you want as you want it... . Cheers, glad i got SysRes going for you....
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