Speaking of Windows success stories ....

[Jeff Mings]

I've had to deal with fixing a similar problem on my Mother-in-law's pc- 
after adding a scanner driver, it wouldn't even boot in safe mode. 
 Here's what may work:
-start it up in DOS
-use a text editor like edit.exe to open c:\bootlog.prv or bootlog.txt. 
 One of these files should contain a list of all of the various modules 
that were opened as Windoze was starting.  When you find a line with 
something like "BlahBlah.vxd loading failed", you've probably discovered 
the show stopper.  At that point you can either rename/hide the 
offending module or stop its invocation.   If it's being called from 
c:\win.ini or system.ini, stopping it is easy.  If it's in the registry, 
you might be able to use another machine to edit the broken machine's 
registry files (probably C:\windows\system.dat or user.dat.  The 
registry is a horrible abomination, and is a good example of what sick 
bastards the pricks at Microsoft are.

-Jeff



Robert Green wrote:

>The funny quotes reminded me -- I have a windows sucks-sess story of
>my own, perhaps one of you folks may have a magic pill suggestion for
>me ...
>
>I was trying to listen to a streaming audio program last week on my
>win 98 box, and it told me it wanted a new version of MS media
>player, so I downloaded the program and tried to install it. It told
>me it wanted to do a reboot to finish the install in typical windows
>fashion, and it was never able to start up since. It tries to boot
>and crashes during the startup. 
>
>I can't even get it to start in "Safe" mode. I *can* get command line
>mode, or to boot from a startup floppy, but neither of those seem to
>be of much use to me.
>
>If anybody has run into something similar, or if you're feeling
>adventurous, I would welcome any suggestions. I would just pitch the
>whole thing out the door and stick to linux only but I have some
>applications for my scanner and digital camera, PDA, etc., that I
>cn't replace with Linux. MS's support web site didn't seem yield up
>anything useful so far. Apparently they never considered that you
>would not be able to start up at least in safe mode. 
>
>Thanks!
>
>Rob
>
>