Thursday night, after Adobe and Norton had been nagging me for days to reboot, I went ahead and did it. Unfortunately, the box came up kinda brain-dead. The desktop looked fine, and I could still play Solitaire, but Firefox, Open Office, Word, et al would start but never get around to throwing up their screens.
Spent a good part of Friday at work trying to figure it out (thankfully I could do most of my work on a different box). Even enlisted the help of a couple of system gurus at work, but they couldn’t fix it either. Will probably have to restore from backup (which always gives me the willies, even though my backup is only a week old).
(I’m typing this on my “spare” computer, which may end up being my “primary”, if things don’t go well.)
Replies
>>>Firefox, Open Office,
>>>Firefox, Open Office, Word, et al would start but never get around to throwing up their screens.
Pretty creepy. Never heard of this symptom. Do you suspect somthing viral/trojan?
Looks like the registry was seriously clobbered.
Well, finally have things working well enough to post from the problem machine. Still got several hours of program reinstalls to do, but saved most of my data.
I'd suspect a driver problem. In any event, you say windows (XP? 7, 8?) is booting, but certain other programs won't boot. Are there any programs beside Solataire that *will* boot? I would try downloading and running a registry check program (I use Advanced Registry Optimizer by Sammsoft), and then a program to check drivers.
I assume you've googled your problem.
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/findbysymptom/tp/computer-wont-turn-on.htm
A little late for all that -- I'm most of the way through the reinstall.
Good
I hope it all goes relatively smoothly. And let us know how the restore goes.
It was about a 12 hour process just to get to the point where I could use Firefox. Then a half-dozen more up to this point, to restore other apps. Still have several hours of app restores to go, and some stuff will never get restored.