I just recently installed a new printer (epson stylus 800) and Microsoft Office Suite. I aborted the printer install because I had accidentally told it to install Avery label pro... so I aborted the install when it asked me if I wanted to install Avery lable pro. I then installed Microsoft Office Suite intending to reinstall the printer drivers when I was done with that. After the installation on Microsoft Office Suite was complete, I said yes when it asked me if I wanted to reboot the pc. The pc gave me an error "while inializing device IOS: windows protection error. You must restart your machine." I can boot into safe mode, but cannot get the machine to start regularly. I uninstalled the epson printer... but cannot uninstall microsoft office, because I selected run from cd.... and the cd won't run in safe mode. Any ideas what i can do besides reinstalling windows? Thanks.

you can do anything apart from re-installing windows really .which you can't because your cd won't run outside windows . or, if it does then why can't you uninstall office? but for example if the error says something like can't load lpt.vxd look in the system folder for lpt. it may now be renamed lpt.001 or something. rename it back lpt.vxd and you are fixed. this can be done in safe mode. or in safe mode remove the lpt port. reboot and windows should detect a printer port and reinstall the driver for you. this is because you may have aborted the device install but sufficient had been done to convince windows that it needs to load a vxd or dll or two . But the act of undoing the device install will have either caused the vxd/dll s to be removed or more likely renamed. This method can be applied to other devices or services also. removing the windows family logon produced a similar error involving vnetsup.dll which I found as vnetsup.001 only this afternoon.

Well... the only error I'm getting is that it's having a problem loading a device IOS... it's not being very helpful about what it's not loading. I looked at the lpt.vxd file... and it's fine. I deleted the lpt printer port and rebooted... it still won't load. I'm still getting an error while trying to initalize devios ios. Any other ideas? Laura

Look at the last loaded driver in the bootlog.txt-file under c: This one is the problem

C:\WINDOWS\system\MRCI.VXD file not found