MM, you rock!
I'm back in action with Win Me in normal mode & fixed the video graphics as
you instructed below. whew!
Now, for my Microsoft Intellimouse, I checked the sys.ini section in the
boot folder and there is no reference there at all for the
mouse.drv=Microsoft
The only items listed are 2 unchecked boxes for *Displayfallback=0
I'm afraid to do anything more with system restore. However i just created a
manual restore point for today.
YAY!
"Mike M" wrote:
luvbuffalo wrote:
I was so concerned after you told me I have may have trashed my
system for using a nine-month old registry that I restored back to a
registry from Sept
26. At that date I was only having the Zone Alarm VxD dynamic link
problem but at least the registry was current.
Good. In all honesty I should have suggested this myself rather than
leaving you to work out that this was a reasonable option.
Ahhhh! Clearing I’m misunderstanding what normal mode is.
I was thinking that normal mode would mean not “safe mode�
Normal Mode means booting into Win Me directly on switching on and loading
all the various drivers, etc. that are required to run your system. Safe
Mode means booting with a very restricted set of drivers and is usually
done by tapping the F8 key as Win Me starts up and then selecting Safe
Mode from the menu that is presented.
and that I
would get back the blue standard background and the 800x 600 pixels
used for my screen area.
In normal mode the resolution and colour of your desktop are dependent on
your graphics card and its drivers and your monitor and how you have
configured them. In safe mode minimal graphics drivers are installed with
low resolution and colour depth - just sufficient for you to be able to
read the screen whilst carrying out maintenance.
But also, that having “normal startup�
selected in the system configuration utility [with all items checked]
would get the system to load installed drivers & configuration
details that existed when the system was built. [to hopefully correct
my display and mouse (not a USB mouse) problems]
If I want to be able to use the mouse, I have to change system
configuration utility to selective startup and deselect system.ini
but other all other options can be selected [win.ini, load static VxD
etc.]
Good. So you have now localised where the cause of your mouse problem
appears to lie. The contents of system.ini. By default the entries
relating to your mouse in system.ini should be something like
[boot.description]
....
mouse.drv=Microsoft Mouse [See note a)]
....
[386Enh]
....
mouse=*vmouse, msmouse.vxd
....
Note
a) Text after = sign may differ depending on what if any mouse software
you may have installed. For example a system here running Win Me with
Microsoft Intellipoint installed reads
mouse.drv=Microsoft IntelliPoint
No doubt installing Logitech mouse drivers would make a reference here to
Logitech.
So now I power on with the selective startup with win.ini and load
statice VXD selected and the screen does not say safe mode in the
corners [although it gives the same appearance as it did when I did
boot in safe mode]. So it looks like the system is operating in
normal mode but I might only need to reinstall the video drivers.
Again good. Before you do that you might want to try the following. Boot
to Safe Mode, open the Device Manager (Control Panel | System | Device
Manager) and delete the entry for your video card in the Display Adapters
section. Now boot back into Normal Mode and Win Me should redetect your
graphics card and reinstall your driver. This may or may not work
depending on the cause of the problem but if it does you won't need to
download and install a new set of Win Me drivers from the manufacturer's
web site.
It is quite normal to have Selective startup checked with "Load
startup group items" checked but greyed. This simply indicates that
the user has an unchecked entry in MSConfig | Startup however the
system still boots in Normal Mode but just
doesn't load the unchecked entry. Thanks for the info, I wondered
about this!
I can't help but wonder if the lack of backed up copies of the registry
predating your problem (there will however only ever be 5 copies at any
one time) is due to the ScanRegistry (scanregw) entry having been
unchecked in MSConfig | Startup.
Your patience & knowledge has really been appreciated
It seems to me that your "To Do" agenda now should be:
a) Resolve your video display problems, hopefully this will be fixed by
reinstalling your current drivers but if not by downloading and installing
a new set.
b) Resolve your mouse problems by checking system.ini for errors.
c) Reinstalling your antispyware/antivirus application
d) Reinstalling your firewall
But before c and d I would suggest checking out that system restore is
functioning correctly. Please post back after you have tried to fix a),
your display problems, and we can try and sort out the system.ini problem
and then check out system restore.
Cheers,
--
Mike Maltby