Hello. I’ve been asked to help with a friend’s computer and it’s got me stumped. Please help. The problem is that at startup an error message appears saying that a file which controls the display is missing or damaged, together with a suggestion to visit windows update to check for new drivers. On clicking OK the screen goes to grey/black and the computer goes to bye-byes. I’ve re-installed all the video drivers both from the original installation CD (no good) and with an updates package from the manufacturer’s web sit, but to no avail. I ran msconfig and find that the computer will startup fine on selective startup and with system.ini unchecked, but the display is totally low res, and trying to click on the settings tab results in the same grey/black screen and computer nanny nap. Apparently this has come about because a CD of assorted games (1001 Computer Games for $9.99 – why do people do it?), was installed. After installation the computer began to freeze up, and she found that she couldn’t access the internet. So she uninstalled the games, and the computer would only start up in Safe Mode. I ran Norton Win Doctor and replaced some corrupted files in registry, then replaced networking and dialup networking and that all seems to be fine now, but we’re stuck with this startup/display problem. I’ve reinstalled winMe twice, but that hasn’t helped, and I’ve used msconfig to extract what appeared to be a couple of vital files (system.ini and ifshlp.sys) but that didn’t help either. System Device Manager doesn’t indicate any problems ie. No yellow marks or question marks. This is the second time this type of cheap and nasty games installation has caused problems with this computer and winMe. The last time I had to do a complete reformat, and I’d like to avoid having to do that again if possible. We would very much appreciate any suggestion you may be able to offer, apart from the obvious comments about buying cheap and nasty games CD’s. I think (I pray) that particular lesson has sunk in now! The computer is an Elite K7S5A M/B with AMD Duron 1200 and 128Meg of SDRam, running OEM winMe with all the updates . The graphics card is nvidia GeForce 2 MX 100/200.

hello you can do system restore from safe mode. and since its oem you have cab files and can reinstall windows over its self. but if system restore dont work with bootdisk at the a:scanreg /restore and try a registery restore point a good one will have started beside it. you have 5 of these set by default.and lose one older point each new day you boot windoz.

Hi. Thanks for the suggestion. In submitting my original post I neglected to mention that there are no safe points in scanreg/restore. I guess that's because they were all lost before I was asked to help? Any idea where I can go from here?

Sorry. I also should have mentioned that the computer was running Roxio's Go Back and there were no safe points left in Go Back. Perhaps because Go Back was installed is the real reason that there are no windows safe points? I've uninstalled it now because without any safe points it was useless, and fdisk wouldn't see the HD partition with it installed.