Windows 7: I've spent 4 days troubleshooting, i'm at a complete loss. please help

EDIT, PROBLEM SOLVED: I was finally able to re-install windows using a usb drive. Everything is good now. No idea what the hell happened though, i'm lost.


I'm having all sorts of errors. I believe it started happening yesterday when I used Revo Uninstaller to uninstall a bunch of BS programs that I don't use. I may have accidentally uninstalled something important.
FYI my cd drive is broke and I do not have any installation disks. I have windows 7 professional Sony Vaio VGN-NS230E. I bought a usb drive and tried to boot from it, but it does not work - i dont know what I am doing wrong

Issues:

- no sound (fixed)

- explorer constantly crashes.

- sfc /scannow does not work - error: "Windows Resource Protection could not start the repair service"

- system restore does not work - error: "Volume shadow Copy Service used by system restore is not working (event log 0x81000202)"

- cannot open picture files: "class not registered"

- cannot open some executables: "the windows installer service could not be accessed"



- windows keeps telling me i have updates available, but when I click it it says i'm up to date.

- windows update says i have never installed any updates (ive installed them all)

I've ran every piece of malware/antivirus/hijacker etc software I could find. It found a few things and removed them but these problems are still occurring

Should also be noted that my entire hdd is encrypted through TruCrypt

I've spent the past 4 days troubleshooting this problem and tried numerous fixes, none have worked. please help.


I bought a USB drive with money that I should not have spent. Upon installing windows I get the error "Windows could not retrieve information about the disks on this computer." ..... i'm completely lost.. I tried to hit the 'populate' button in device manager and it says "volume information about this disk cannot be found".

Certain EXE's dont even run. What the hell is going on?

While your problems are all over the place, they're more likely self-inflicted than malicious in nature (which I think you've already figured out, given the wording and tone of your post). So, I wanted to talk about the second part, the bootable USB key (or lack thereof). Specifically what did you do to try and make the key bootable (so you can ultimately run the Windows 7 repair options, I would assume)?

First off thanks for the quick response.

What I did was download a copy of the windows 7 professional .ISO file from here Windows 7 Direct Download Links

Then, I used a program called WinToFlash which copied everything from the ISO to the USB drive. I then went into BIOS and configured it to boot from the usb drive (in my case, it was just "external" in the bios options). I save/restart and it just hangs.

Assuming your ISO has a valid MD5/SHA1 hash that matches the one from Digital River, you should be OK there. However, I've never been a big fan of WinToFlash for this particular area, especially when Microsoft makes a tool that does this in a supported way - I would recommend you use that instead and re-test your key.

That's one EXE that won't run.

Interesting. Are you sure you're not infected? At the very least, you could be getting bum downloads (I've never seen that .EXE fail, ever).

All 6 scans I ran came up with 1 thing, which was removed, it was a registry entry. it didn't show up when I scanned again. The error I'm getting when I open the exe: the windows installer service could not be accessed

I tried everything on the internet to solve this problem (really, from forums to MS site, services.msc, cmd's). Nothing has worked.

It sounds very much as though the Windows Installer is badly corrupted.

You could try running these two commands from the command prompt window with elevated privileges:

msiexec /unreg
msiexec /regserver

Been there, done that.

Oh well, sorry I bothered.