First of all thanks for all your help.
I downloaded and ran the recommended utility but it did not detect any problems and therefore no fixes were applied.
My optical drive is also offline because of all of this, so I think that I should be focusing on restoring the registry or otherwise fixing System Restore.
Yes. That was the first thing I tried. I let my computer sit here for 12 hours straight without interruption and it did not complete. Finally I turned it off because I was going to bed. And I tried running it at least one more time a day or two after that with a different restore point.
Ah, now I see a culprit. Follow these steps:
- Click Start, and then click All Programs.
- Click Accessories, and then click Run.
- Type regedit, and then click OK. If you are prompted for an administrator password or for a confirmation, type the password, or click Allow.
- In the navigation pane, locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}- In the right pane, click UpperFilters.
Note You may also see an UpperFilters.bak registry entry. You do not have to remove that entry. Click UpperFilters only. If you do not see the UpperFilters registry entry, you still might have to remove the LowerFilters registry entry. To do this, go to step 8.- On the Edit menu, click Delete.
- When you are prompted to confirm the deletion, click Yes.
- In the right pane, click LowerFilters.
Note If you do not see the LowerFilters registry entry, unfortunately this content cannot help you any further. Go to the "Next Steps" section for information about how you can find more solutions or more help on the Microsoft Web site.- On the Edit menu, click Delete.
- When you are prompted to confirm the deletion, click Yes.
- Exit Registry Editor.
- Restart the computer.
Steps taken from Your CD drive or DVD drive is missing or is not recognized by Windows or other programs.
My optical drive is working without following these steps. I just inserted a disc and was able to access its filesystem. I made an incorrect assumption when I tried to create a system repair disc.
What happened was: I ran Create a system repair disc, and as it said it was enumerating devices, I got an error message that said "System repair disc could not be created The system cannot find the file specified (0x80070002)" Then when I clicked OK there were no drive options. In fact it crashed when I clicked on Create Disc.
Winamp also crashes immediately when I try and run it. Probably because of the audio problem. Sound is still not working. In the bottom right corner there is a speaker icon with a red x on it.
First download setacl. Then start an elevated command prompt Elevated Command Prompt
setacl can be found here: SetACL: Windows ACL management - Browse Files at SourceForge.net
Put setacl in c:\windows
After that check security of hklm hive in registry. Is it full permission for both administrators and system?Code:SetACL.exe -on "hklm" -ot reg -rec yes -actn ace -ace "n:administrators;p:full" SetACL.exe -on "hkcr" -ot reg –rec yes -actn ace -ace "n:administrators;p:full" SetACL.exe -on "hklm" -ot reg –rec yes -actn ace -ace "n:system;p:full" SetACL.exe -on "hkcr" -ot reg –rec yes -actn ace -ace "n:system;p:full"
Neither of the above worked. But I'm not giving up yet.
When I followed your directions for setacl, lines 1 and 3 completed eventually. But lines 2 and 4 gave an error message that said "Error in command line: Invalid option specified: -rec! Type 'setacl -help' for help."
So I moved onto the second thing which showed which keys were updated and which ones failed. Most of them failed. So I tried to run from command prompt after booting from a CD, but it doesn't work from there.
I think part of the conflict might be that some keys are in use or otherwise locked by windows and so I have to do this while windows is not running. I've tried that of course but I think if there is a permissions problem that could be further the reason why I cannot do a system restore or anything. I've tried importing the backup I have of my registry from a CD command prompt but that fails too.
So I think I might have to update the permissions on the registry from a CD command prompt. But I'm not sure how.
I think the dash before rec might not be a hyphen. I'm going to try this again without copy/pasting. That would explain why it worked with lines 1 and 3 because I manually typed it then. But copied pasted for lines 2 and 4.
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