at my wits end with apphelp.dll errors!

OK, how I got here may or may not be important, but basically a VMware VM was misbehaving. I tried to "power off", but it was hung. I couldn't even kill the vmware process. So I was going to reboot. I started installing some Windows Updates, but they looked like they were hanging too. Just rebooted.

On reboot a lot of my startup programs (and those I try and run manually) throw an error about apphelp.dll being corrupt or missing. I never knew this dll existed, but google says it's pretty important.

I let checksur run, it completed. Rebooted - no better.

I ran sfc /checknow - results were that it found corrupted files, but could not fix them. I have that log, its over 40k lines. A lot of "Failed to verify if catalog file is valid" and "Failed to parse package manifest" entries.

Tried replacing apphelp.dll in safe mode (from my same-OS desktop). Did not help, so I'm not sure that's the actual issue.

Also ran CCleaner to see if it was a registry issue. No help.

Was going to bite the bullet and try an upgrade/repair install. It won't run for some reason (could be using the corrupt dll for all I know). It gets to me selecting Win 7 Ultimate x64 and then says I can't upgrade 32bit to 64bit or vice versa. But I'm choosing x64 and double-checked that my laptop is running x64, so that can't be the problem.

Was going to try and comb through the CBS.log file and see what files it's complaining about and try and replace all of them with a batch script in safe mode. But that file is really strange, and I'm not sure what, if any, of these files really need to be replaced or is it that the XML Parser can't read any of the files because apphelp.dll is crashing it?

So I need help. Apparently I have some corruption in my OS files, but I can't fully determine where and therefore how to fix it. I obviously am desperate to NOT have to re-install from scratch.

Does anyone have any ideas or utilities I haven't tried? Appreciate any help/links/tips!

-AJ

Yes, I'm trying everything possible to avoid a from-scratch reinstall. Too many programs and settings I'd have to deal with on that kind of reset!

I'll be honest, and it's obviously biting me now, I turn off System Restore after installs. So I don't have one.

I have a recent backup, but I don't know that it'll do me much good, because these system files are so hard to just replace.

I agree, the reboot during updates is probably where it started. It is what it is now. (Note, I didn't force the reboot or power-off the PC, I just happened to choose restart during the updates...one would think there would have been a transaction rolled back or something.)