Win XP SP2 certain dialogs don't come up

[--Scott]

Hi,

How do I fix the problems below?

I allowed the auto XP updates over the weekend. On Monday morning I turned
on my computer and walked away after logging into XP as Administrator. I
came back just in time to see the computer re-boot itself but I didn't get to
see any message about why it was doing so.

The following things have changed about my Windows:
- in My Computer, the left pane used to be white and blue but now the
background is black,
- I can open the Control Panel but Add/Remove Programs won't open and there
is no error message nor beep,
- when I ask software to print, I get the Printer Dialog but when I click on
the Properties button the Printer Properties dialog doesn't come up. Again
no error message nor beep.

I re-booted into a second partition on the hard drive. That copy of XP is
working fine but I haven't updated it. I used that partition to scan for
viruses and spyware. No viruses found and only some cookies found for
spyware.

Thanks in advance.

[mj]

Try this, follow these steps:

1. Put the Windows XP CD to the CD-ROM.

2. Click Exit if the auto-menu pops up.

3. Click Start, and click Run.

4. Type SFC /Purgecache" (without quotation marks) in the Open box, and
click OK.

5. Type "SFC /Scannow" (without quotation marks) in the Open box, and click
OK.

Note: There is a space between "SFC" and "/Scannow".

For more information, please refer to this article:

Title: Description of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 System File Checker
(Sfc.exe)

Link: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;310747

[--Scott]

MJ,

Thanks for your response. Your solution fixed the problem. My colors are
back to normal and I'm able to open all the dialogs again. I verified that
there weren't any unknown programs listed in Add/Remove Programs.

But, this process leads me to a second question. I'm running Win XP Pro
SP2. My original WINXP CD is SP1a. I updated to SP2 over the Internet. In
fact I tried to repair the Windows installation with the CD but it complained
that the version of XP on the hard drive is newer than the CD.

When I ran SFC /SCANNOW it told me that I had to put in the original CD
which I did. It refreshed the DLL cache. If it refreshed the cache from my
old CD, is my XP now using components from SP1? If so what do I do about it?

I went to the Windows Update site but it didn't find any required updates.
I seem to remember that Add/Remove Programs listed all of the security
patches that were installed over the Internet. Those aren't listed now.

I followed your link to read about WPF but it didn't answer my question.
Does anyone know if someone in my situation qualifies to get a new XP CD from
Microsoft for free?

Thanks again.