Apparently letting AVG PC Tuneup mess with my registry (it claimed the keys didn’t refer to anything) was a huge mistake.
I’m running Windows XP pro 64.
Outlook 2007 now gives me an error on startup:
The problem with this is, Outlook IS set as the default client (I double and triple checked). The consequence of this is that it won’t sync with my PDA.
Unfortunately, I lost the system restore point before PC Tuneup messed with everything, as I was installing some other software too and it bumped that restore point off the bottom of the list.
I’ve tried to repair and uninstall from the Control Panel> Add/Remove Programs, and it doesn’t work (it doesn’t launch anything). I’ve also tried the Fixit app as well as manually uninstalling from C:\WINDOWS\Installer. I have also tried restoring the C: drive and system state from Wednesday’s backup, which also hasn’t worked.
What can I do now? The only thing I can think of is to wipe everything and start over, which I’d really prefer not to do. I had a hard time getting the OS to install properly the first time, and I have an awful lot of software that I’d need to reinstall.
I have incremental C: and system state backups from earlier (it runs every Wednesday), but I’m not sure that would work, either, since last Wednesday’s backup was prior to the PC Tuneup.
Just for information’s sake: the next step after a failed repair/uninstall is an in-place reinstall. With Office, there’s even a chance that, when you attempt the reinstall, the setup program will detect the previous install and offer to repair it. But, even if it doesn’t, installing on top of it should still work.
Also, it’s fairly easy to remove the uninstall entry if it no longer works. Whether you do it before the reinstall (to make sure the program has no idea it’s been installed before) or afterwards (if you have two of them), Microsoft provides an Uninstall cleanup wizard. But, for ease of use, I prefer using CCleaner.
Another point for future reference, if the AVG restore doesn’t work you can try running a system restore (the one built in to Windows) which should restore your registry to the date specified.
Yeah, repairing / reinstalling from the CD was one of many things I tried. The setup wizard didn’t give me any options other than “Install” or “Custom Install” and my attempt to install on top of the current installation not only failed, but after that point I couldn’t export my .pst files. I had to roll back to a previous restore point.
WRT restore points, yeah, it seems only the last 48ish hours or the last 6? restore points are saved, whichever is less. It didn’t start crashing Outlook until I booted up the following day, so the restore point had already fallen off the list.
That said… a system rebuild might not be a horrible idea anyway (although I’m really glad I don’t have to do it as an emergency and can plan for it/take my time). The guy who originally built/set up my computer did some truly idiotic things with how he managed the partitions, such that the “benefits” he thought he was giving me are very much outweighed by the problems it causes. For people who’ve upgraded from XP Pro to Windows 7 Pro, did you like it? Is it worth it? I have some aging software that 1> I need to work/run my business (Adobe CS2, Office2007), and 2> am very unlikely to have the money to upgrade anytime soon, so that’s also a consideration. Is Win7 backwards compatible that far?
Also, I’ll be switching to using Acronis TrueImage for backups as soon as my new portable HD arrives in the mail. My plan right now is occasional full backups supplemented with differential backups. What would be a good schedule for this? Full once a week, differential every day? Full once a month? I don’t know how long a full backup would take so I’m not sure how to assess the trade-off between having good recent backups and how much time it would take (during which I presume it would be annoyingly slow to try to continue working).
That’s why I said ‘for future reference’. In case someone else searches and finds the thread, it is uncommon for the system restore storage limit to be so low that it only keeps 1 or 2 points.