Installed Windows 7 over Vista with no trouble except when Windows starts a window titled "Desktop Gadgets" pops up with the following message:
"Settings.ini is being used by another process. Close the
other program...."
The above results in having no sidebar or gadgets, and I have no idea what the other process might be in order to close it. Any help would be appreciated.
Hi Ken:
When this error comes up and I kill it in task manager the notice disappears. If I type sidebar in search, a list of six items appears, five of which brings up the "setting.ini notice", the sixth (Get more gadgets on line) works as it should. The gadgets I had installed are as follows: Wikipedia, Weather Network, clock, CPU speed monitor, and yellow note pad.
I appreciate you help on this problem. It certainly is not "earth shaking" but it would be nice to have gadgets working. I did the same upgrade on my laptop and gadgets work fine. Please let me know if you think of anything else.
Warren
I had the same problem and the problem shows up in one of the two accounts (the one with administrator rights) that I have on the machine.
I tried many suggestions from the web including the one aboe, but none would work.
I also tried doing a restore from a previous restore point, but it would fail with an error that a file could not be replaced.
As I examined the Application Logs, I noticed that there were many errors about user profile errors related to bad entries in the registry.
The recommendation in that error is to perform an advanced restore, which restored the whole disk from a week old backup disk image.
BTW, That's a neat new feature in Windows 7 in that it also offers to backup user files that can be recovered after the re-image of the drive...
I could not pin it down to the culprit as I had not dome much on the machine since the date of that image backup I had.
In the restore point history were a few Windows updates over that week (1/22/10 to 1/29/10) and and update to the Yahoo IE Tool bar to 8.1 (which was the last thing I did to the machine).
If it was data corruption in the registry that would be a bad side effect of one of these updates (highly suspect is the Yahoo IE Tool bar 8.1).
Hello. I am receiving this message when logging in with administrator. No gadgets load, even when I type it in on the start-search.
When we log in as guest no message appears and the gadgets load with no problem.
Also lost the menu on the top of the window.
I had to reload windows 7 about a month ago and had no problems but all of a sudden this message appears. I did load some new gadgets recently and they all worked but now there's a problem.
Any solutions?
i got the same error message after installing the yahoo toolbar as well and that was the only thing that i changed on the computer before that message started coming up now though even after i got the thing off my computer the error is still present. trying to find a way to fix the problem without resetting the computer to the restore point i have from the day i turned it on though.
Well I HAVE YOUR SOLUTION! Consider it fixed!
This works in Vista as well :):):):):)
More than likely, Settings.ini is corrupted!
1) Go to my computer, then search for settings.ini
2) Rename the file to something recognizable like settingsBUSTED.ini, ....BROKEN, or whatever you want.
3) The file should be recreated by windows and should work.
If you have multiple instances of the file, rename each one until your gadgets, widgets, sidebar or whatever start to work.
Sometimes you cannot rename some instances of the file... So start with the ones that allow you to rename.
For me, this totally worked like a charm!
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www.VSL1200.com
Last edited by ChristianNoir; 22 Aug 2010 at 16:44. Reason: added instructions
I discovered that some windows update must have kicked out "full control" on my admin/user account. After I went into the user accounts and gave back the full control, the error message disappeared and my sidebar now loads normally.
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