"Windows Rot"

[Guden Oden]

I thought XP was fairly immune to this shit, after all I haven't bothered reinstalling this box since I got it from dell in march last year for example and not had any negative issues because of it, but now I feel the need start to creep up on me. *SIGH!*

Yesterday, any further windows explorer windows refused to work/respond if I had a folder displaying jpeg files open. (!)

Today, an internet explorer window showing B3D shut itself spontaneously as I clicked a web link embedded in a post and disappeared without a trace, nor any error message.

Also today: doubleclicking the time display in the system tray makes the date and time applet flash briefly on-screen and then close itself. Right-clicking the time display and selecting "adjust date and time" simply does nothing at all.

 

[Rys]

Well, just to throw a counterpoint into the thread, my old AMD-based workstation had a 14 month old XP install that worked just fine with no niggles. I've never had that much trouble with XP at all since its launch and if I have it's usually been fixable without fuss or bother.

How old is your install, Guden?

 

[Polygon Crusher]

Usually that occurs when the user does some change that shouldnt be done. Maybe you sued some program to cleanup Windows?

Could also be malware.

 

[_xxx_]

I thought XP was fairly immune to this shit

LOL!

 

[ANova]

I haven't reinstalled in 3 years. XP runs just as great as it did when I first installed it.

Sounds to me like you either have some malware/viri or some hardware component is failing.

 

[mjtdevries]

Usually that occurs when the user does some change that shouldnt be done. Maybe you sued some program to cleanup Windows?

Would be nice if Microsoft made some cleanup tools themselves, so you would be sure that they don't mess up windows...

Do you guys have recommendations for good (registry) cleaning tools?

 

[_xxx_]

Keep away from reg cleaners!

 

[Simon F]

I

Yesterday, any further windows explorer windows refused to work/respond if I had a folder displaying jpeg files open. (!)

Same has happened to me. I think mine was caused by a corrupt thumbnail image. IIRC, the solution, I think, was to clear out all thumbnails.

Mind you, XP explorer will crash on average once a month <shrug>

 

[Fodder]

Ancient install of XP running just fine here, I think I last started from scratch just after SP2 came out. If you look after your install you'll have no troubles.

 

[Sobek]

You might find something has/attempted to, hijack your explorer executable.

Have you tried replacing a backup copy from the Windows/ServicePackFiles\i386 folder into /Windows while in safemode? At the very least, check the size of the currently inplace Explorer.exe in your Windows dir against that of the one in the ServicePackFiles to see if there's any discrepancy.

I've almost found that when strange things like that happen, it's because some asshat spyware/virus is fiddling with primary executables. Usually they get re-modified/replaced on boot so some hardcore scanning and reg cleaning is probably in order too...

Let us know. :smile:

 

[Polygon Crusher]

Same has happened to me. I think mine was caused by a corrupt thumbnail image. IIRC, the solution, I think, was to clear out all thumbnails.

Mind you, XP explorer will crash on average once a month <shrug>

Maybe he should try to delete the Iconscache file located in application data folder (Hidden file) and delete it. Then he should restart windows so that it rebuilds it again.

 

[Polygon Crusher]

Would be nice if Microsoft made some cleanup tools themselves, so you would be sure that they don't mess up windows...

Do you guys have recommendations for good (registry) cleaning tools?

There is no one which does the jobb perfect. I myself use CCleaner (CrapCleaner) becouse it allows me to see what it finds in the register and then I can choose to view the reg key in the regedit panel. In that way I have full control but never ever do I trust such a prgram to do it automatically for me!

 

[mjtdevries]

I learned the hard way not to trust those programs to do it themselves.

Most will check if a file/directory listed in the registry actually exists. If it doesn't they will delete the key.

Unfortunately there are lots of programs that use tempfiles and have them listed in the regsitry, altough the file itself might not actually exist at the time you look at it. Photoshop is one of those programs.
Photoshop still worked, but it was horribly slow. I had to reinstall it.

You would expect the commercial regcleaners to know about that...

At the moment I also use CCleaner the same way that you do.

 

[bloodbob]

Keep away from reg cleaners!

How is a registry cleaner supposed to know what is no longer needed really. Its a joke what is the registry cleaner going to reverse engineer every program on your entire computer? no. I used one once on 98 and it @#$# my pc they are worse then anti-virus programs.

and XXX YOU GET REP!!!@#!&$(@#!!!

 

[_xxx_]

Heh, I'm talking from experience (similar to yours, bloodbob )...

 

[Sobek]

How is a registry cleaner supposed to know what is no longer needed really. Its a joke what is the registry cleaner going to reverse engineer every program on your entire computer? no. I used one once on 98 and it @#$# my pc they are worse then anti-virus programs.

and XXX YOU GET REP!!!@#!&$(@#!!!

A regcleaner on '98? Of course you had problems

Quite seriously, people that use regcleaners and just tick 'delete all' should be shot. I tend to browse over what's being displayed (with frequent cleaning, this is entirely managable), and remove only that which I know is relevant. To bork your '98 install, you would have to have just cleaned everything it found willy-nilly without any extra thought.

Otherwise...it should be fine.

Guden, give Hijackthis a run too while you're at it, just to be extra sure there's nothing nifty running on startup (that may be hidden to msconfig and normally viewed areas of the registry). http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/index.php

 

[swaaye]

LOL guys. Microsoft themselves has an official regclean for 9x. But yeah, I've never had to use one with XP. XP isn't 9x in so very many ways.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download458.html
Realize that MS themselves has removed this program from their download sites. It's probably flawed somehow. Flawed by nature.

 

[mjtdevries]

How is a registry cleaner supposed to know what is no longer needed really.

There are lots of ways that a registry cleaner tool could use to know that.

Take the photoshop tempfile issue for example:
- It could check if the photoshop.exe is present anywhere on the system
- It could ask you if you still use photoshop
- It could keep a list of registry entries that it should leave alone.

But that means that the people programming it would actually have to know what they are doing! And it would mean that they need to regularly update the tool for new programs.

 

[overclocked]

To use Reg cleaner you are one of those geeks seeking thrills. Its like bungee jump for nerds. Yes i do it BTW...

 

[Himself]

Problem with reg cleaners is more a problem with scattered data in the windows registry. If a reg cleaner finds a path to a file that doesn't exist, it can display it to the user, and even delete the key structure for that file association (for example), but it won't clean any other references to the functionality of whatever it was supposed to be doing. All it really ends up doing is reducing the size of the registry hive, the problems more than likely still exist. It's unlikely to really create more problems though, if there is a reference to a non existant file, your system is in a mess anyway, some uninstall program farked up.