New
#1
Strange misconfiguration of settings
Hi guys,
After a merry go round with 1st line MS support suggesting irrelevant Mr. Fixits etc, I thought I'd turn to you all to get to the heart of a solution. I kindly appreciate any assistance in manually returning my machine to a normal state.
In the last week of Sp1 updates, my machine has suddenly become unable to open certain applications which used to work fine. Two I am aware of are:
1. Any OpenOffice executable (e.g. scalc.exe, swriter.exe, etc) - Upon launch, error displayed is "The application has failed to start because its side-by-side information is incorrect. Please see the application event log or use the command line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail." After uninstalling it and associations going to WordPad, I'm getting the same error when clicking on an RTF file for example, but WordPad starts anyway. WordPad opens fine when manually opened. Not so with OpenOffice, which doesn't open.
2. Adobe Reader X - Upon launch, error displayed is "Adobe Reader Protected Mode - Adobe Reader cannot open in Protected Mode due to a problem with your system configuration. Would you like to open Adobe Reader with Protected Mode disabled?" Consequently, if we select the option "Open with Protected Mode disabled" and continue, an error appears: "Fatal Error - Acrobat failed to load its Core DLL".
As an attempted solution, I've un-installed both Adobe Reader X and OpenOffice, restarted, and attempted to re-install from freshly downloaded installers. The exact same errors persist.
Causes? I'm not sure which is the cause of my problems, but two notable things I recall in the last week was a series of automatic Win 7 updates being pushed to my machine, and also the automatic detection and removal of malware (Dynamer!.dtc) by Microsoft Security Essentials. So I suspect it might be Security Essential's automatic removal of this not being complete due to unexpected behaviors of this resilient trojan, or a disruption in MSE's removal process due to Windows 7 having been in an unrestarted state between a series of updates awaiting configuration, or maybe it's totally unrelated to this and just some messup purely of the Windows updates, or other.
But all I want is a solution! I need to be able to open Reader and OpenOffice after installing them. I hope I can avoid having to do a re-format and clean-install of Win 7 again, given that sometimes people say when Sp1 is installed you can't Repair the installation, but I don't know, I haven't tried , maybe I should or is there another way?
I'm not a super power techie beyond the above but I can follow instructions well; any help in returning my operating system to normal so I can successfully launch these applications would go a long way.
Thanks and regards!