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#1
XP issue- MSE failing to start on PC boot
I've had this issue a few days now and am trying to troubleshoot it. It's a Windows XP SP3 machine. A few days ago MSE stayed red on booting the PC. A restart fixed it. The next day it did this again and a restart did not fix it. I had Superantispyware installed as well and ran a full scan- 7 minutes into this scan MSE turns green. Full scan finds no malware anyway. Reboot and MSE works. This morning I ran the PC for an hour, things worked fine, shut down a bit then restarted and MSE failed to start. Reboot and still not working. Waited 10 minutes, it didn't come on, I had to uninstall MSE and reinstall the program, which now works.
I've only installed a few games recently, all gog.com downloads. A week or so ago right before this began I switched XP to classic mode. While I doubt it's the cause, could the switch to classic mode have caused a conflict?
I uninstalled SAS in case it was suddenly conflicting though it hasn't before.
I did some Google searching and found a suggestion to make sure 3 services were set to automatic start- RPC Locator, BITS and Windows Installer. 2 of the 3 were set to manual, I changed them to automatic. I haven't had MSE fail to start again after several reboots.
So what's the problem? Did SAS suddenly conflict? Did changing themes to classic cause an issue? As unlikely as it sounds could the games be a problem(most bundle DOSbox with them)? I've 100% ruled out malware as this PC isn't used much and I only install trusted programs and even so I ran malware scans with Malwarebytes before installing them(download them to my 7 PC, transfer to the XP computer). Now, I run MSE just fine on my Windows 7 PC, along with having the free versions of Malwarebytes and SAS installed(no real time protection running for those) and haven't had any issues with MSE. But this is Windows XP, I have 2 GB of RAM. Could system resources have been in conflict somehow all of a sudden?