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#1
Seems Like Cascading Failure - Is Reinstall The Only Option?
Apologies to gregrocker about not getting back to him about the HP All-In-One thread I started. If I get time I'll get back to it.
I've been putting off my daughter's laptop for a while (ASUS 64 bit - 7 Home Premium, SP1) problem for about a week. It started with itunes - saying 'itunes has detected a problem with your audio configuration.' A day or so later she complained that she couln't watch youtube videos.
I began with youtube which actually worked fine on IE9, just not on Firefox and Chrome. I uninstalled Flash then couln't get it to reinstall - I'd download the executable, click on it to install and the icon would disappear. I finally downloaded a Flash uninstaller, two seperate Flash installers - 1 for IE and 1 for other browsers. Using those I was able to get Flash up and running again on IE. However trying to play the same youtube video on Firefox gives me a box about Shockwave not responding, cancel or continue, and continuing gives me 'An error occurred. Please try again later'. Chrome never gives the Shockwave error, but always yhe try again later.
I have done a Firefox repair. No improvement. Have tried to start all over with Chrome, but attempting to remove it through the Control Panel told me that it had already been removed, and would I like to remove it from the list. Clicking yes did not only not remove it from the list, but Chrome was in fact still usable. I used Revo uninstaller to get rid of Chrome, but trying to reinstall gives me a msg taht some Windows updates need to happen before I can install Chrome. I cannot get any page to display when I try to access Windows Updates. Even doing a Google search for Windows Updates and clicking on windowsupdate.microsoft.com only takes me to a MS page that wants me to use the Start Menu to get to the updates page. That is what does not work.
I have run a full MSE scan that found no errors, have run a chkdsk /r /f that detected nothing, have run sfc /scannow that found no integrity violations, used F8 on boot, selected Repair your computer, but it found no problems.
One of the other 'funny' wrinkles is that although IE9 works fine, it's the 64 bit version. If I go to the program files (x86) folder, open Internet Explorer and click on iexplore it does nothing. No error and no access.
I'm out of ideas. Again.
***** Update
Was able to access Windows Updates through the Control Panel. One important Update and 1 optional. A Net Framework 4.5.1 update (important) failed with an unknown error - 00000001 and although IE10 installed correctly, it was unusable both in 64 and 32 bit. Unfortunately uninstalling IE10 and going back to IE9 did nothing, so at this point even IE9 is useless.
And I see in taskmgr that I have a slew of dllhost.exe applications with a description of COM Surrogate. Everything I seem to do to improve things only serves to exacerbate the problems.
Last edited by boweasel; 19 Jan 2014 at 17:30.