New
#1
Need Help! (come here when I do I guess)
Hello!
I am having a problem which seems to not quite ever get better, it sometimes gets partially fixed, only to reveal a new problem...
As quick as I can summarize.... but I know it will not be too brief as I always want to give as much info as possible....
About 3 weeks ago, something happened.. cannot exactly say. I may have made a change or I may installed a driver or ran a system restore -- all or none could have been the problem.
First my system: an AMD64 HP laptop, with a 350GB internal drive that has Windows 7 as my main WIndows install (with 168GB total partition space allocated for it), then I have a Vista 32 bit install (simply for backup in cases such as these) which is roughly 80GB, and the remainder is a debian linux install. The bootloader is grub2 which simply gives me a Windows or Linux option, and from there, choosing the windows bootloader, I can choose to use Windows 7 or, in the laternative, the Vista install. I also have a 21" monitor running from this laptop and two 1TB external drives. I am using USB hubs which are independently powered.
The really great thing which I am afraid is in jeopardy is that I have had a successful, no... a triumphant Windows 7 installation since January of this year. Prior to that... whether due to bugs from HP, my configs, beta Windows 7 version issues, or... my own paranoid-induced stupidity (as evidenced by a thread here from 1.5 years ago) whatever the case, until Dec., 2009, I was an eager, but unsuccessful WIndows 7 user... I think I typically would have to do a clean re-install of Windows 7 every week or so...
To return to my summary: After the unknown event mentioned above, I noticed my that all my carefully tuned/tweaked services (per Black Viper) had been completely changed. The work-stopping problem was however, that I had no functioning network adapters.
After several days of careful repair of my services, the last potential problem I thought had could be remedied by restoring a 6 week old registry backup (since I had changed things in the registry and had not documented them very well). I knew that whatever was still causing my problems, was somewhere in the registry... probably something as small as changing the "Type" subkey of some service... So, I thought restoring all changes I had made would fix it. If not, I was prepared to do a windows 7 repair install.
After the registry restore, the system wasn't happy, but, my adapters worked. And I thought my travails were over, and everything from that point was simply a matter of clean up.
One of the first things I did was use a registry Cleaner contained in Windows 7 Manager.
However, after I cleaned it (and because I restored a registry that was 6 weeks old), I had close to 900 entries which the Win 7 Manager's cleaner suggested I delete), I backed up the registry, created a restore point, and went ahead and deleted them.
Everything seemed fine.... upon reboot, windows worked, the adapters worked, but from out of nowhere, my mouse did not (a microsoft intellipoint wireless usb mouse). I switched to an older mouse I had used and it worked, and ran sfc /scannow.
But then upon reboot, the second mouse I had switched to no no longer worked either. The device manager showed virtually all mouse devices showing a "problem" and several HID-devices as well. I tried uninstalling all of these drivers, and scanning for new hardware. No luck. They could be installed, but the still showed a problem.
If I boot from a Windows 7 installation disk, every usb mouse I try works perfectly. Further, if I boot into Vista, I have no problems with any mouse. Only in this Windows 7 installation.
So.. exasperated, I decided to do a repair install (because I cannot, under any circumstances do a clean install since the number of applications I would have to reinstall would take me 60 hours of time). But upon trying the repair install I got that goofy error (paraphrasing) "reconfigure your boot.wim settings and set Flag to 9", I did a little research on this error and found a lot of conflicting info.
I was hoping someone could tell me any opinions they have. This seems to be a driver mess. But system restores do not complete successfully and neither did the restoration of the old messed up registry. So, I am left with a working laptop, internet adapters functioning fine, but no way (in my experience) in which I can get a mouse working. I tried a USB non-wireless, a Logitech USB wireless, and the MS intellipoint wireless mouse; none worked.
I meant to include some extra attachments (like what my device manager looks like), and some diagnostics... but I am in my Vista installation, and have to go rerun those and post them in another post.
But any help or insight on any of these mouse driver/HID driver problems would be appreciated.
Or, if someone knows how to get rid of this boot.wim error, I will just do a repair install. But I really cannot do a clean reinstall...
Thanks so much for reading this. I know it was long and redundant.
Paul