<DIV>Just a thought, but have you tried System Restore to see if a restore point was created before the Acrobat 7 upgrade? In my experience an upgrade or new installation may trigger a problem that has been lurking for some time though. </DIV> <DIV>It is sad but I have to reinstall XP ever 4-9mos. Unacceptable, but it is a notebook and Linux setup is painful. My Ubuntu desktop is a rock by comparison.</DIV> <DIV>Donald Greg McGahan<BR><BR><B><I>Peter Jay Salzman <p@dirac.org></I></B> wrote:</DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE class=replbq style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid">Hi all,<BR><BR>At work I have to use WinXP, but all of my development is with open source<BR>tools like cygwin, miktex, etc., so I'm almost happy.<BR><BR>This morning a bad thing happened. Adobe Acrobat wanted to install an<BR>update 7.0.5 on my work computer, and stupidly, I allowed it. It wanted to<BR>reboot to finish the upgrade, and again, I allowed it.<BR><BR>Unfortunately,
after the reboot, my system has become flakey. Here are some<BR>manifestations:<BR><BR>1. Some of the shortcuts in the start menu lost their bitmap and have become<BR>the default Windows bitmap of an unregistered file. Clicking on the<BR>shortcut doesn't "do" anything. When I view the properties of the<BR>shortcut, the target type is "This is not a valid shortcut". They have<BR>an empty "target".<BR><BR>Only some of the shortcuts do this. Additionally, I can't delete them.<BR><BR>2. Wierd errors. For example, when I try to install yahoo IM, it errors out<BR>with "Could not load the DLL library C:\WINDOWS\USER32.DLL. The<BR>specified module could not be found." I've verified that this library<BR>exists in C:\windows\system32 but not c:\windows<BR><BR>3. Other strangeness that feels like permissions problems.<BR><BR><BR>The reason why I'm posting to vox-tech is that one of the help desk guys<BR>noted that i have a lot of "illegal software". this is the term he actually<BR>used; i'm
not making that up. he was referring to firefox, putty, miktex,<BR>gvim, cygwin, etc. he said i have to uninstall the "illegal and unsupported<BR>software" to "fix the machine".<BR><BR>I've got a better idea. I'm going to try to fix whatever is wrong without<BR>uninstalling my "illegal" software. Hence, the post to vox-tech.<BR><BR>First, everything points to the Acrobat upgrade, since that is the only<BR>thing that occured in between the time the system was good and not good.<BR>But this hardly matters.<BR><BR>Any ideas? Many of the things seem to point towards permissions problems.<BR>The filesystem is NTFS. Is there a notion of permissions and file ownership<BR>on NTFS? If so, if I didn't have access to read a *.lnk file, would<BR>explorer tell me the "link is not valid" like I see in point #1 above?<BR><BR>Many of the problems feel like permissions problems to me. Could some kind<BR>of permission problem conceivably cause problem #2 above?<BR><BR>I don't have the admin password
for this computer, but I noticed a utility<BR>on the web that obtains the admin password on XP machines. Actually<BR>*changing* the admin password is out of the question, for obvious reasons.<BR><BR>Any help appreciated. I got a good dressing down for installing Firefox,<BR>and I really do NOT want to call the help desk again.<BR><BR>Thanks,<BR>Pete<BR>_______________________________________________<BR>vox-tech mailing list<BR>vox-tech@lists.lugod.org<BR>http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech<BR></BLOCKQUOTE> <DIV><BR></DIV>