- Outlook Express won't start. it says "MSOE.DLL or one of its libraries failed to initialise." - AOL instant messanger is broken, and complains about shdcoclc.dll not being a valid windows image. - I can't download any programs using Internet Explorer. any time i click on a link that is supposed to open up a download dialog, it simply does nothing. FTP links won't work either. my virus program, PC-Cillin 2002, which i recently updated with the latest updates, found one virus, in a zip file that i downloaded loooooong time ago. but all these problems just recently started occuring. what's going on??? at the moment i'm making a list of all the things i need to backup in preparation for a hard disk wipe. and it's alot!!!! so i don't want to have to do that..... please assist.

weird, and I just discovered can't add pages to my favorites anymore!!! haha.... crap.

Did you run a scandisk. Turn off your antivirus software and do a scansisk.

windows XP doesn't support Scandisk, so i used "CHKDKS /F" from the command prompt and let it check the disk on a system restart. it found some bad attributes and deleted them. but i am still having the DLL and internet explorer related problems.

I would say just wipe the hard drive even though its going to take alot of stuff it should take w/e the problem is and wipe it also.

ok, i've decided to wipe. i was meaning to do it eventually anyway, just to clean my computer and get windows running nice and fast like it did when it was a fresh version :) so, i have 2 hard drives. the first is divided into 3 partitions, the first being a FAT32 with Windows 98. i have that so i can run DOS programs. the second is NTSF, the third is FAT32. the second hard drive has 2 more NTFS partitions. what is the best way to wipe the WIN98 partition and the WINXP partition? my other partitions will remain intact, right? they contain alot of data that would be a pain to backup, which is why i want to leave them be. i assume that they couldn't be part of the problem with windows, since they don't have windows on them??