Help Please. A friend can no longer use system restore.

[grok]

4. I'd try it anyway

The first symptom you mentioned means the file associations are all wrong. a function of the registry.which is a mess now obviously. a restore should fix that.

Not sure why the links are all wrong now. might also be a problem with the registry. I suspect your PATH variable was changed.

You should still have access to executables directly.

note that all these issues could be fixed by hand but it would take hundreds of tweaks in which one is likely to make a mistake

To play it safe i would run the restore under safe mode.. you get there by repeatedly hitting the F8 key while the system is booting. you would be running in administrator mode which *might* still have the proper file associations and links.


restore to the to some point before she started having problems. maybe a little further back to be safe. personal data files should still be intact.

Bottom line is the registry file is corrupt to an extent we can't begin to fathom. it needs to be restored. failing that. u need a livecd to copy everything you want to save off to an external/flash drive and reinstall everything.

the suspects are CCcleaner which by nature modifies extensively the registry. usually it does a great job. the other is is the ABIword/extras uninstall. The Uninstall is *supposed* restore settings to what they were previously before the program(s) in question was uninstalled.. maybe it just didn't do that.