I installed a fresh copy of windows on my PC about 2 months ago after formatting. Since then I've had two really annoying glitches and now a new one has just come up.
First one is Drag 'n Drop not working, at all, except when putting items on the Start menu or quick launch bar.
Second, something called WMI refuses to let me see my system information, change advanced settings on network connections, and also I keep getting shaderapidx9.dll errors when running newer Source powered games such as Left 4 Dead. I worked around that by turning WMI off in the services menu, but its still no perfect fix. I got it working properly a while ago by running some rundll32.exe command but that stopped working last week.
Lastsly, the new one, the Windows Installer seems to have had some trouble lately. After booting windows up, if I install something from a .msi file, it works, but if I try installing anything after that, it keeps coming up with "The Windows Installer could not be accessed" errors. WTF? I can get it working again by starting the Windows Installer service in services.msc but if an installer such as the NVIDIA driver setup starts another installer (NVIDIA PhysX) it just sits there for a bit and then fails.
This is exactly what I've done.
The PC I installed XP on is:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 | MOBO: Gigabyte GA-965P-DS4 rev. 3.3 | RAM: 2GB Kingston DDR2-800 | GRAPHICS CARD: Gigabyte GV-NX86S256H 8600GTS 256MB GDDR3 | SOUND CARD: VIA Envy24 Tremor | HDD: Seagate ST3104AS 250GB 8MB cache 7200RPM
I installed the SATA drivers with the F6 method. The disc I used was an SP1 slipstream disc. After booting up windows, I put SP2 on from a disc from my dad's work (MS gave it to them), booted up no problem. The drag and drop issue was there since before the service pack. I then put SP3 on from a NAG cover DVD - March 2008 I think. Then I started installing drivers - Chipset drivers, video and audio drivers and the like, and after about 3 reboots I had finished the driver setup. Then I started installing all my software and putting my backups on - music, pictures, school stuff - and then started putting all my games on. All this time drag and drop hasn't worked, despite the service packs I installed. All was well for about a week, and then Left 4 Dead crashed on startup - the famous shaderapidx9.dll crash. After about 3 hours of Google-ing I found 3 solutions. One was making sure the game had administrative permissions, another some über long rundll32.exe command, and the other was another über long .bat file I downloaded that supposedly refreshed the WMI repository. It kept coming up with file not found errors so I left it and tried the rundll32.exe command. It wanted my XP disc and some SP3 files so I extracted the SP3 .exe installer with WinRAR and told the command to find the files there. I discovered that if I stopped the WMI service Left 4 Dead would run, but that's no permanent fix and it also means I still can't change advanced network connection settings (ICS and firewalling) or see my system information using sysinfo32.exe. I kept trying the rundll32.exe command and after I think the 3rd retry WMI started working again - YAY! Or not. A month later the problem comes up again and I haven't been able to fix it again since. Then last week the Installer problem started happening. I'm now in a state of WTF?!?
I really don't feel like reinstalling if it means I have to drag out the old floppy drive again, and I'd rather not like slipstreaming SP 2 and 3 onto a new XP disc.
Hope this helps.
QUESTION: If I repair XP SP3 with an SP1 disc, would there be problems? Or do I HAVE to go and slipstream? And if I do eventually get around to slipstreaming, should I do one with SP2 and then SP3 on top of that?
What can I do to fix these errors without completely reinstalling windows?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
