A friend (honest) asked me to look at his computer as he is getting a bunch of errors on start-up of Windows ME. Sometimes the machine is left dead, other times some programs don’t work.
He gets a mass of messages of the form <program name> caused an error in win2_32.dll. Many programs issue this message, including sometimes Explorer. When Explorer issues it, the machine dies as there is now no desktop.
He has a Dr. Watson print-out that indicates that at some point our good friend AOL trampled on somebody else’s memory.
A virus scan and disk scan show the machine to be clean and no disk errors.
The machine does start up OK in Safe Mode.
At this point, I suspect the registry.
I reinstalled WinME. During the final configuration step, it gave an error on running a registry script (and like a fool I didn’t write it down), then a ton of errors from regsvr32.
The machine still didn’t work.
I then tried the installation again, but this time after booting from a WinME startup diskette in case the installation was having errors because of the sick state of a full Windows boot. No joy.
What now?