Windows 7 Ultimate - lost control of virtually everything, but that's now solved!

jeallen01

Specialist Contributor
Joined
Oct 12, 2003
Messages
6,674
Reaction score
2,630
Points
113
My Satellite Setup
See Signature
My Location
Somewhere in England (possibly?)!
Here's something for you to ponder on - a "virtual" pint for the first one to reach the right conclusion and solution (and it's actually quite "simple") because I think other people could maybe fall into the same trap.

I'll start with the basic situation, and then drop a few clues as we go along.

Over the last few days, and then again yesterday morning, I was trying to uninstall a number of unwanted programmes (notably Avast Free A/V which must have accidently got side-loaded with something else!) using
- first, the Windows Control Panel "Programmes & Features" route, but that was not very successful
- second, Revo uninstaller - again not very successful
- thirdly the uninstall feature in IOLO System Mechanic Pro which I had never tried before, but didn't seem to do very much either and so I aborted that.

Everything then seemed OK at the time, although the laptop screen went rather dim whilst the extended desktop on the monitor was fine.

Rebooted the m/c to try to fix the laptop screen issue - only to find that almost nothing now worked (Office with a message that the licence details could not be confirmed, and the network adapters and connections didn't connect). Same thing happened on several more reboots :(.

- and then I did some more things, but I leave those for the next clue after your first thoughts/guesses!

..
 

Channel Hopper

Suffering fools, so you don't have to.
Staff member
Joined
Jan 1, 2000
Messages
35,536
Reaction score
8,554
Points
113
Age
59
Website
www.sat-elite.uk
My Satellite Setup
A little less analogue, and a lot more crap.
My Location
UK
Flat cell battery / date incorrect ?
 

Lazarus

Retired Moderator
Joined
May 29, 2009
Messages
27,078
Reaction score
8,664
Points
113
My Satellite Setup
80cm Motorised.
Several small Dishes.
Much else.
My Location
North York Moors
Avast gets sneakily loaded with CCleaner updates unless you are very diligent in unchecking all the options.
 

jeallen01

Specialist Contributor
Joined
Oct 12, 2003
Messages
6,674
Reaction score
2,630
Points
113
My Satellite Setup
See Signature
My Location
Somewhere in England (possibly?)!
Last edited:

jeallen01

Specialist Contributor
Joined
Oct 12, 2003
Messages
6,674
Reaction score
2,630
Points
113
My Satellite Setup
See Signature
My Location
Somewhere in England (possibly?)!
Avast gets sneakily loaded with CCleaner updates unless you are very diligent in unchecking all the options.
Likely so - must have been before I uninstalled CCleaner for good :(
 

jeallen01

Specialist Contributor
Joined
Oct 12, 2003
Messages
6,674
Reaction score
2,630
Points
113
My Satellite Setup
See Signature
My Location
Somewhere in England (possibly?)!
OK, 1st clue/question - if it was not that simple, and you could find no way to gain access to virtually any programme/function (apart from connections to plugged in USB drives and so on) and virtually every repair option in the Control Panel appeared to be "greyed out", then what "higher level" would you think about?

FWIW, I'm try to follow the sequence that my aged brain followed from yesterday morning until early this afternoon when I found and fixed the problems (and there were actually an awful a lot of individual ones, but they all had the same solution!).
 

Channel Hopper

Suffering fools, so you don't have to.
Staff member
Joined
Jan 1, 2000
Messages
35,536
Reaction score
8,554
Points
113
Age
59
Website
www.sat-elite.uk
My Satellite Setup
A little less analogue, and a lot more crap.
My Location
UK
If you had not selected safe mode to get to the admin menu (or you were logging in remotely without full access rights) then menus would be unavailable.
Are you running the operating system from a USB stick ?
 

jeallen01

Specialist Contributor
Joined
Oct 12, 2003
Messages
6,674
Reaction score
2,630
Points
113
My Satellite Setup
See Signature
My Location
Somewhere in England (possibly?)!
If you had not selected safe mode to get to the admin menu (or you were logging in remotely without full access rights) then menus would be unavailable.
Are you running the operating system from a USB stick ?
Select Safe Mode? - ah you got me there as I forgot to try that, but, on reflection, I'm not sure that would have helped
(and not running from a USB stick, the OS is on the laptop SSD - the large laptop on my main desk).

Second "clue"/"question": think about what I said in Post #1 about what I was trying to do that resulted in the problems - what do you think that might have caused, given that each attempted uninstallation took a long time, and I sometimes had to terminate it, and didn't manage to actually uninstall anything significant?
 

Channel Hopper

Suffering fools, so you don't have to.
Staff member
Joined
Jan 1, 2000
Messages
35,536
Reaction score
8,554
Points
113
Age
59
Website
www.sat-elite.uk
My Satellite Setup
A little less analogue, and a lot more crap.
My Location
UK
Thinking in order to gain a virtual pint...........

Were you virtually legless at the time ?
 

jeallen01

Specialist Contributor
Joined
Oct 12, 2003
Messages
6,674
Reaction score
2,630
Points
113
My Satellite Setup
See Signature
My Location
Somewhere in England (possibly?)!
Thinking in order to gain a virtual pint...........

Were you virtually legless at the time ?
Stone cold sober (11am in the morning) and sweating a bit!

OK, some more info & clues:
- yesterday afternoon and this morning I got an Win7 Ultimate ISO file and a Product Key from ebay, and then wrote the ISO to a bootable flashdrive using the "Rufus" app, and then tried to run the Setup process on that from Windows Explorer on the laptop (which could see the drive) to see if I could at least get into "repair mode", but I got the message from Setup that "Windows could not retrieve information about the disks on this computer" and then it terminated.
- Similar thing happened when I tried to run Setup from the Win 7 Home Premium Recovery Disk that came with the laptop - but, of course, it's now on Ultimate (Pro with a few bells & whistles).

Didn't take me long after that to track down, find and start fixing the problems!
 

Terryl

Specialist Contributor
Joined
Apr 14, 2011
Messages
3,246
Reaction score
1,932
Points
113
Age
82
My Satellite Setup
OpenBox X5 on a 1 meter motorized dish.
And now a 10 foot "C" band dish.

Custom built PC
My Location
Deep in the Boonies in the central Sierra Nevada mountains of California.
Avast gets sneakily loaded with CCleaner updates unless you are very diligent in unchecking all the options.
I've never seen that happen on hundreds of installs of CCleaner and updates for it ????(on clients computers) But I run those two on all my PC's ( paid for Pro versions) and never seen this on them. jeallen01 why would you want to get rid of them, they work great for me.

And your date was maybe set right but the time was off,(between the two computers) this can cause problems if your booting from a network dive (your m/c) to the laptop and trying to modify programs that may be stored on a virtual disk located on another PC.

I have also found that once you upgrade the OS to a higher level (W7 Home Pro to W7 Ultimate) that the recovery disks don't work so good for the old OS when trying to recover.

I have also run into problems when trying to upgrade from W7 home to W7 ultimate, it some times does what your experiencing, I had to install it (W7 ultimate) to a second hard dish and do a dual boot, worked fine after that.
 

Lazarus

Retired Moderator
Joined
May 29, 2009
Messages
27,078
Reaction score
8,664
Points
113
My Satellite Setup
80cm Motorised.
Several small Dishes.
Much else.
My Location
North York Moors
There's a big fuss about the CCleaner/Avast issue in the ether right now (re. Free Version). I Googled it after falling victim myself a few days ago.

I can assure you it's a live issue, @Terryl
 

jeallen01

Specialist Contributor
Joined
Oct 12, 2003
Messages
6,674
Reaction score
2,630
Points
113
My Satellite Setup
See Signature
My Location
Somewhere in England (possibly?)!
I've never seen that happen on hundreds of installs of CCleaner and updates for it ????(on clients computers) But I run those two on all my PC's ( paid for Pro versions) and never seen this on them. jeallen01 why would you want to get rid of them, they work great for me.

And your date was maybe set right but the time was off,(between the two computers) this can cause problems if your booting from a network dive (your m/c) to the laptop and trying to modify programs that may be stored on a virtual disk located on another PC.

I have also found that once you upgrade the OS to a higher level (W7 Home Pro to W7 Ultimate) that the recovery disks don't work so good for the old OS when trying to recover.

I have also run into problems when trying to upgrade from W7 home to W7 ultimate, it some times does what your experiencing, I had to install it (W7 ultimate) to a second hard dish and do a dual boot, worked fine after that.
As I said earlier, it had nothing to do with the date/time settings, or a Win 7 Home to Ultimate (which worked fine by the online update process both times I've done it) - just Google the Setup message I quoted in Post #10, and follow your nose.:)
 

jeallen01

Specialist Contributor
Joined
Oct 12, 2003
Messages
6,674
Reaction score
2,630
Points
113
My Satellite Setup
See Signature
My Location
Somewhere in England (possibly?)!
There's a big fuss about the CCleaner/Avast issue in the ether right now (re. Free Version). I Googled it after falling victim myself a few days ago.

I can assure you it's a live issue, @Terryl
Removed and don't use CCleaner Free for exactly the same reason - although I didn't get caught by the hidden malware "payload" that came with several recent versions of that programme.

PS: IIRC, the malware was also hidden in some versions of the PAID-FOR CCleaner!
 
Last edited:

Channel Hopper

Suffering fools, so you don't have to.
Staff member
Joined
Jan 1, 2000
Messages
35,536
Reaction score
8,554
Points
113
Age
59
Website
www.sat-elite.uk
My Satellite Setup
A little less analogue, and a lot more crap.
My Location
UK
There's a big fuss about the CCleaner/Avast issue in the ether right now (re. Free Version). I Googled it after falling victim myself a few days ago.

I can assure you it's a live issue, @Terryl

I now have a similar conflict between the free -latest- malwarebytes and jetclean 1.5
 

jeallen01

Specialist Contributor
Joined
Oct 12, 2003
Messages
6,674
Reaction score
2,630
Points
113
My Satellite Setup
See Signature
My Location
Somewhere in England (possibly?)!
OK! I'll put you all (?) out of your "misery" (if you've bothered to contribute to/follow this thread!):

That Setup error message, when Googled, points to the services.msc (Microsoft services console) part of Windows, which you access by "Windows" key + "R" and then type "services.msc", or from Windows Explorer, right click on the PC and "Manage" and then select "Services" to get to a long list of Services that have been installed, and most of those should be running.

However, in my case, about 95% had been disabled - presumably by the attempts at removing certain apps :(.

However, I went through the list carefully and re-enabled about 85% to either "Automatic Start" or "Automatic Start, Delayed", rebooted the system (took a time as I got a message about "configuring Windows") and when the Desktop came up and stabilised - then "everything worked" as it had done before the "problem".

So never forget services.msc if you run into unforeseen problems like I have - and I hope I won't!

PS: nobody won the "virtual" pint, and so I'm "in pocket" :-rofl2
 
Last edited:

Channel Hopper

Suffering fools, so you don't have to.
Staff member
Joined
Jan 1, 2000
Messages
35,536
Reaction score
8,554
Points
113
Age
59
Website
www.sat-elite.uk
My Satellite Setup
A little less analogue, and a lot more crap.
My Location
UK
Sounds like a serious registry issue looming. Are you certain you have ‘fixed’ it ?
 

jeallen01

Specialist Contributor
Joined
Oct 12, 2003
Messages
6,674
Reaction score
2,630
Points
113
My Satellite Setup
See Signature
My Location
Somewhere in England (possibly?)!
Sounds like a serious registry issue looming. Are you certain you have ‘fixed’ it ?
I believe that pretty much everything is now fixed, whereas - when the problem was at it's worst - I ran the System Mechanic Registry Checker and it didn't find any problems like broken links, and so I don't think the problem was in the Registry. However, when I examined the list of services in services.msc, I could almost immediately see why many functions were not working, such as the Windows licencing check working not being enabled and thus preventing all the Office programmes starting (they terminated immediately after starting with messages that the validity of the licence could be confirmed).

Also, yesterday afternoon and evening, the m/c ran perfectly with every programme that I checked now working and with full network and web connectivity.
 

jeallen01

Specialist Contributor
Joined
Oct 12, 2003
Messages
6,674
Reaction score
2,630
Points
113
My Satellite Setup
See Signature
My Location
Somewhere in England (possibly?)!
I think I have now pretty much got rid of Avast Free after a couple of sessions of Regedit - one in Normal Mode and one in Safe Mode - as well as removing the Avast folder in c:\Programmes, and it does not shown up in Control Panel Programmes & Features or in Task Manager.

System Mechanic Analyser found a few broken links in the Registry and fixed/eliminated them.

However, I still get a very brief and blank Splash screen as the m/c boots into the Desktop, and so I think there is still "something" there somewhere - also some drivers are probably left in the System 32 folder and I will eliminate them in due course when I find out exactly which ones I should look for.
 
Top