[vox-tech] windows support, unfortunately

[Peter Jay Salzman]

Hi all,

At work I have to use WinXP, but all of my development is with open source
tools like cygwin, miktex, etc., so I'm almost happy.

This morning a bad thing happened.  Adobe Acrobat wanted to install an
update 7.0.5 on my work computer, and stupidly, I allowed it.  It wanted to
reboot to finish the upgrade, and again, I allowed it.

Unfortunately, after the reboot, my system has become flakey.  Here are some
manifestations:

1. Some of the shortcuts in the start menu lost their bitmap and have become
   the default Windows bitmap of an unregistered file.  Clicking on the
   shortcut doesn't "do" anything.  When I view the properties of the
   shortcut, the target type is "This is not a valid shortcut".  They have
   an empty "target".

   Only some of the shortcuts do this.  Additionally, I can't delete them.

2. Wierd errors.  For example, when I try to install yahoo IM, it errors out
   with "Could not load the DLL library C:\WINDOWS\USER32.DLL.  The
   specified module could not be found."  I've verified that this library
   exists in C:\windows\system32 but not c:\windows

3. Other strangeness that feels like permissions problems.


The reason why I'm posting to vox-tech is that one of the help desk guys
noted that i have a lot of "illegal software".  this is the term he actually
used; i'm not making that up.  he was referring to firefox, putty, miktex,
gvim, cygwin, etc.  he said i have to uninstall the "illegal and unsupported
software" to "fix the machine".

I've got a better idea.  I'm going to try to fix whatever is wrong without
uninstalling my "illegal" software.  Hence, the post to vox-tech.

First, everything points to the Acrobat upgrade, since that is the only
thing that occured in between the time the system was good and not good.
But this hardly matters.

Any ideas?  Many of the things seem to point towards permissions problems.
The filesystem is NTFS.  Is there a notion of permissions and file ownership
on NTFS?  If so, if I didn't have access to read a *.lnk file, would
explorer tell me the "link is not valid" like I see in point #1 above?

Many of the problems feel like permissions problems to me.  Could some kind
of permission problem conceivably cause problem #2 above?

I don't have the admin password for this computer, but I noticed a utility
on the web that obtains the admin password on XP machines.  Actually
*changing* the admin password is out of the question, for obvious reasons.

Any help appreciated.  I got a good dressing down for installing Firefox,
and I really do NOT want to call the help desk again.

Thanks,
Pete