My Windows 7 has reverted to Windows 98

My Windows 7 has been rock solid until Saturday. It's been so good I've lost all my trouble shooting chops. Now, almost none of my windows programs will work.

Saturday, Windows Update pushed about 33MB of updates to my system. After rebooting to configure the updates and start Windows it gave me an error to the effect of: "Update Failure, reverting changes. Do not turn your computer off." It rebooted several times with the same message and finally hung on the "Shutting Down" screen. When I say hung, I left it on when I went to bed about midnight and it was still in the same place when I looked at it the next morning around 10. Naturally, I just unplugged it and restarted it. To my surprise, it advised me that all the updates had been successful and booted up. Unfortunately, only a few of my programs will load and work. I can get into Control Panel and a few of the applets that's about all. I backed out all of the Saturday updates to see if it would work as before but no joy. The programs I try to run get loaded into memory, I can see them in the Task Manager Process window but nothing else happens.

Today, I backed out all the updates one by one to see if that would restore some functionality but no joy. I have no idea what is going wrong, Event Viewer doesn't seem to tell me anything useful that I recognize. Anyone have any suggestions besides tearing it down and starting over?

My system is almost exclusively a home entertainment media server for my music and film collection. It is a P4 3.06GHZ w/4MB memory and about 3TB of storage, about 60% free. I'm running Win 7 Pro and using principally J. River Media Center 14.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Try this:

System Restore

theog said:

Try this:

System Restore

Already tried that and it didn't work. However, I found Brink's excellent tutorial for doing a Repair install and ran that to completion. Unfortunately, there was no change in the problematic behavior. Some of my troubleshooting chops are coming back and the problem is not exactly as originally described. It seems only the desktop, quick launch, and some of the links off the start button and program menu no longer work if I click or double click them. Something gets loaded into memory but the program doesn't run. However, when I "right click" and "Run as Administrator" the links on the desktop, they'll work. Also, I can't start Explorer from the "quick launch" bar but I can start it from the "Computer" icon off the Start Button. If I then to navigate over to the actual executable and double click on it, the program will run. It is not an ideal situation but it is now at least workable.

Is this the "trial" version of Windows 7?

Adrian said:

Larry, restart in "SAFE MODE" observe the boot and see where Windows bombs out!

I'll try that and let you know what happens.

sygnus21 said:

Is this the "trial" version of Windows 7?

No. I had that one but I did a clean install with the full retail version; activated and registered.