Yesterday was another harrowing experience at the Windows System Restore.
I’m not sure what happened exactly. When I came into the computer room from dinner, the virus scanner was reporting viruses found, except the “virus” was actually an exception during scanning. Every file it scanned in realtime was generating one of these exceptions, even innocuous ini files. Something was amiss.
So I rebooted. The scanner seemed to be working fine, so I did a full scan and found nothing. But then other weird things started to happen. For one, I couldn’t get the Properties dialog to appear for any folder. Also, BitZipper would not display any system dialog, specifically the one for selecting a file to open. No matter what I did, no dice. And after uninstalling some programs that were likely to cause such problems (stinking StarDock!), things got worse.
I ended up botting to safe mode and logging in as Administrator to get to System Restore. Otherwise the system would hang after clicking the Start button. I elected to restore the system back to some date in March, before certain applications were installed.
When the system came back up, I downloaded the firewall upgrade that was rolled back over the elapsed time and rebooted again. Then I removed Firefox from the system entirely and reinstalled the optimized build for my processor. I added only the essential extensions: WebDev Toolbar and Tab Mix 0.2 (this is actually new, since I was using the flaky but exceptional TabBrowser Extensions).
And now the system is humming again.
I need to reinstall StarDock’s Multiplicity, though. It actually offers useful functionality, which most of StarDock’s software does not - and I should do without.
