Dad's PC

Dad's PC decided not to access the internet at all yesterday afternoon. It would still access all the network shares but Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera all refused to browse the net. It wouldn't even let me update ZoneAlarm or Spybot Search & Destroy. After spending about two hours trying to diagnose the problem and come up with solutions I was still stumped. Nothing I tried seemed to work and some of the options that I wanted to try I couldn't access. I'd run checks with ZoneAlarm, HijackThis and Spybot S&D to no avail..

I finally decided that I would back up the documents, pictures, music files, video files and downloaded items he wanted to keep and reformatted. XP reinstalled a breeze and after installing a few other bits and pieces such as Avira Antivirus and Comodo Firewall I reconnected the network cable and all was good again. Started downloading updates from Windows Update and after a reboot prompted by Windows Update I again ran into problems.

As soon as Windows booted and Explorer opened nothing else would run. No matter what program I tried I would get an "inaccessible or insufficient permissions" type error. I couldn't diagnose that problem without going into Safe Mode and disabling Simple Sharing. In fact it said I didn't even have enough permissions to shut down the PC; I had to use Task Manager for that.

Anyway, in Safe Mode, all the file permissions had been blanked and this appeared to be the reason that nothing would run. After changing all the permissions back to what they should be and re-enabling Simple Sharing I rebooted into XP again, only to have the same problem. A visit back to Safe Mode revealed the permissions had again been wiped. Reset them and left Simple Sharing disabled while rebooting into XP.

The same problem was persisting and checking the permissions in XP revealed that my latest change had taken and everything should be working. A quick check of the m$ knowledgebase, thanks to a link provided by a friend, provided me with instructions on how to use the in-built security editor to reset all permissions back to their default values. Nope, still no luck; even after another reboot.

Deciding that since very little had been installed I would once again reformat and reinstall. After reinstalling, installing AV and Firewall protection and downloading updates from m$ again everything finally seemed to be working. I left the PC defragging the drives and went up to bed just after 3am; a full 11 hours after I had gone downstairs to originally see what the problem was.

Got up this morning and the PC seems to be working okay still. Dad has spent most of today reinstalling his games. What would normally take me about 2-3 hours; depending upon how much extra software I installed, took almost half a day and I didn't install a lot of the stuff that I would normally install for him. Bloody PCs!