Yesterday I went on a bit of a PC clean-up: defrag, full virus scan, downloaded all the current Win98/IE5.5 security updates and so on.
Today a good number of programs aren’t working. All that happens is that I get a pop-up saying ‘An unexpected error occurred’. Major programs (IE, games, MS Office things) all work fine, but none of my shareware/freeware things that look like Visual Basic software are working.
I’ve gone through and checked that I have the DLLs and OCX files for a couple of programs I downloaded today that don’t work, and now I’m stumped. What’s stopping the programs from working?
(example of one that doesn’t work: Enigma browser, downloaded from download.com)
In doing all that disk cleanup you may have eliminated a file these programs were using. Possible culprit: scandisk set to delete cross-linked files. Try reinstalling just one of the affected programs and see if that fixes some or all of them.
I don’t think it’s that worrying (hopefully). All the major programs are working – browsers, Office software, games – but it’s the small freeware or shareware software that seems to be buggered. The only thing I can think of is that as part of the MS download I ended up with the whole MS VM replacement/upgrade, and that somehow it’s not compatible with whatever those programs were written in. Could it be Visual Basic? Some kind of incompatibility with the security upgrade to VM? I’m not clued up on this area of things.
Oh, for sure, you could have overwritten one of those occursed VBRUN dll files with an incompatible version. Those damn things were the bane of my existence when I did technical support as my main job function.
You could always try uninstalling them one at a time in the reverse order you installed them, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.