Solved Dot Net Hell, 4.8 installs, is somehow corrupted

[XweAponX]

I know the dot net issue has been beaten to death in here, but I could not find anything like what is happening with my system. I am running Windows 7 x86 on a Dell XPS 8300 system.

Before you laugh, this is because of a 30 year old Laser Printer in the shop where this computer resides, which can't accept 64 bit drivers. It's an old 10k dollar HP Laserjet, the owner is not going to buy a new one any time soon. SO FAR we have survived by running Windows 7 x86 in VMware. However, this machine was built on an i5 before Intel and Windows started getting weird about allowing us to install to anything newer than a Kaby Lake. That's the chip in the original system. This new system is running a Sandy Bridge, so the machine was built when Windows 7 was still supported. But in general the system only supports 64 bit, I have found workarounds to get 32 bit working.

It was running fine after installing the proper chipset drivers, but I made the huge mistake of unlocking my Group Policy against Windows Update, one of some 34 updates that had been waiting since early 2020 caused a Blue Screen Loop. I did a system restore to just before I ran the update, but suddenly my Event Viewer vanished. So I can't even get hints about what's crashing... And I've never seen Event Viewer vanish like that, when I try to run it from Admin Tools, it says the snapin cannot be loaded. Grr.

And then the main program which the client uses, would not start. Or anything that needs dot net. I ran the dot net verification tool, and it said I was missing 1.1, 2.0, and 3.5, I installed 1.1 but 3.5 would not install even through the Control Panel, So, I'm thinking maybe an in-place install might repair what's missing. Since 4.8 is installed, then it must be one of the missing dot net packages that is causing the disappearance of event viewer. One of the programs I run is Yamicsoft Windows 7 Manager, none of the parts of that program run either. I know it needs dot net. But the main program which the customer runs, won't fire up for the same reason.

The hard drive was taken from an i5 Kaby Lake system on an ASRock H110 Motherboard, which had 8GB of DDR4, the XPS has 8GB of DDR3. The Windows installation accepted all of the XPS drivers and I found a broadcom XP driver for the Ethernet port.

I finally got my group policy working and re-activated my WU, so I am going to install all of the dotnet security updates, and I hope to blazes that it does not cause another reboot loop.

If that does not work to get past this issue, I'll need some help. I have had some great dot net issues in the past, but so far, this is the worst, of any OS I have never had. I've tried everything, but there is not that much I can do with the available tools - The Verifier was taken offline from RaymonCC's website, and those tools mostly don't work anymore anyways. I just need to make sure all of my dot net's are installed, this is supposed to be taken care of my installing the latest version, but there is a version 3.5 that has to be installed via control panel add/remove features.

I am getting my installer medium ready... I can't even find my original installer. I don't even know how to activate 7 these days...

 

[SIW2]

Why not use the most recent dell win7 recovery media to install fresh on that machine.

It is 64 bit,
GDXKK_X8V66A00_W7SP1PRO64_ROW.iso

The most recent 32 bit for dell
MT5KY_N6N9GA00_W7SP1PRO32_ROW(DL)_20180219-1247.iso

 

[XweAponX]

Thanks for the information.

I wasnt sure which forum to put this in, as I have never had to deal with it before.

I was finally able to turn my Windows Update back on, after trying through Group Policy Editor several times. I would have used one of those restore medium had I not been able to do that. Fortunately, the WU policy was turned off, and then I just installed every dot net and VC Runtime update offered.

Because those update were being installed during the update that got corrupted - I think it was an incorrent AMD radeon Driver that was in the update queue. In fact I'm sure that ws the cause.

So after I re ran those updates and rebooted, BOOM, Event viewer was visible again and my Apps worked.

I had never had an update cause a BSOD during installation of Dot Net updates. So, when I ran Sysrestore, it also turned my policy rule back ON, by default it is "not configured". Without dot net, the policy editor could not flip the rule off again. Finally, it just flipped off after I tried it a dozen times. The dot net error box gave me an option to try to run the edit anyway, and it actually worked. So after that it was easy to reinstall the corrupted updates, which were half-installed. What a pain!

Thanks!