justacruzr2

Thanks. I'm going to try that.

Well I use Nrton Utilities for certain things and I especially like System Doctor to able to monitor the background. The confusing part of this is that on my other computer running the same XP Pro it works fine.

Well I figured once everything froze there was nothing more to wait for. Not one key works and the mouse pointer just locks solid. I did put up task manager to watch the beginning and it showed the app in the processes so it's getting that far. Didn't notice the HDD light. It's Norton System Doctor from NU2002. I've been working on this problem for about a month and have tried at least 30 different things. There was a mention in the release notes about upgrading from Millenium and to remove NU2001 before upgrading which I believe I did. But I also installed NU2001 sometime afterwards as it was the only version of NU I had at the time and at that time I didn't know there was a compatiblilty issue. During that install XP informed me that some of the apps of NU were being disabled because they are not compatible with XP. OK....so I found NU2002 on eBay and got it and uninstalled NU2001 and then installed NU2002. The thing I think may be the problem is that a registry key (one of those 25 digit long hex keys) is still in there and wasn't deleted by the uninstall. Also Norton's System Info errors out when I click on the memory tab saying "can't find first module". One of the things I did was uninstall NU2002 and then go thru the registry and delete every key, that was left, that had Symantec, Norton, Sysdoc32 and the names of all the other apps that come with NU001/2002. That's why I think it's something hidden. By the way, the NU2002 I got off eBay is also installed on my other computer running XP and it works fine.

Does anyone know of an app that can be used to step thru or step execute another app? I'm trying to figure out what is causing an app to lock-up my computer. When I start it, I get the "working in background" mouse pointer and about 10 seconds later it just locks-up the computer and the only way to clear it is to turn the computer off. I've tried everything I can think of to eliminate this problem from uninstalling /re-installing to turning on/off services etc. I would like to see the app's side of the story. Specifically the last few instructions before it locks-up. Maybe from that I can see what it's trying to do and solve this problem. It might be a registry entry or a missing file or ? Thanks.

Thanks for the advice. As for the 98SE/ME drives I probably will have to unplug it before I boot over. It's what I'm doing now with a Maxtor external usb drive. It's a pain in the butt since many times I forget and the 9x series OS's never handled unknown devices very well and just lock up at boot.

Don't have an extra PCI slot. Also most of the Ethernet cards I've seen are PCIe. No PCIe slot in my computer.

I'm thinking about (finally) getting high speed internet. I know I will need a wi-fi router and a usb wi-fi stick. I will also need XP compatible software for both. Here's my questions: 1) Is that all I will need? 2) Since I have a multiboot computer with 98 and Millenium on the other 2 drives is it realistic to be able to find software compatible for them too or will I have to disconnect the wi-fi stick every time I boot into them? If you're wondering why this late in the game it's because I finally paid off my mortgage and now have a lot more available cash.

NU2001 on 98SE and Millennium and NU2002 on both XP setups. Neither do I....yet. If I did that on the one that is having a problem I would probably never get it unset from startup. It locks up the computer about 5 seconds after starting. I'm going to try taking the registry entries from the other XP installation and import them into this computer. I'm not sure but I think I did that before and it didn't work or it didn't work correctly. If I remember correctly, I couldn't set any performance data in SysDoc because it kept telling me that it couldn't find the computer. Hmmmm...try the one your sitting on! Anyway it's one of the more useful things, to me, in Norton Utilities. I like to see what's going on behind the scenes. Do you think anyone here might know? If so, I could post a topic on it and get some input on which direction to go. It's as frustrating as the Search Column problem we just solved.

No I didn't. Reason being is the daily driver computer XP system is configured the same as the HP XP installation and it does work as it should on that computer. I figured it was something else. The program that has the problem is Norton System Doctor (the NU 2002 version). It's the same as the HP computer. Strange for it to work on one but not the other.

Hey Dave, do you know of a free program that can trace/track what's going on in the background and doesn't require a ."whatever" framework to work. I'm having a problem with a program that locks up the computer about 5 seconds after starting it. Works fine in 98SE and Millenium and on my other computer that runs XP but not on my daily driver computer that has XP (same one we've been talking about).

Probably a symptom of the same problem. One more thing I thought of was could you use the registry from the computer that does have THE Administrator or is that computer too different? If you could, you could use 98 to backup and then restore to the computer with the settings problem. Just a thought.

I was thinking about that last night. Maybe when you renamed the account it looked at that account in a different way and now there is no provision for it to return to the original way. I wonder if there's a way to reset it. I wonder if you could use Files and Settings Transfer Wizard to take your settings from your other computer that does work correctly and transfer them to the one where you renamed the Administrator account. Only other thing that I can think of would be to start from the beginning again (re-install) but I'm sure you don't want to do that.

Logging on as THE Administrator is the only way it saves those settings. And it is the only difference I have ever found between logging on as the lesser Administrator and logging in as the top Administrator. Was it intentional or a mistake only MS knows. Yeah, it doesn't seem logical to me either. There certainly are an abundance of more crucial things to restrict access to. When I'm done setting up the Administrator account I'll probably delete the Default account. The Administrator account wasn't even there when I installed all the 3rd party software so I have to go thru the whole start menu as the Administrator so each program can save its settings in the Administrator account under Application Data. That takes a little while.

I was beginning to think that might be the reason but I'm glad you finally resolved this annoyance as have I.

Just out of curiosity why not try renaming your account back to Administrator and/or take it off auto logon and see what happens.

In my Groups account Administrator is listed first and then my "Default" account which is what I have been using since the install. Right click on Administrators in Groups and select properties and see what's there. In mine there was Administrators and then my Default account. Did you rename the Administrator account to Dave? If not then somethings funny.

Hi Dave. Can you wait till Monday as I'm walking out the door from work and can't access MSFN from hime. Sorry.

Dave, here's some additional information. After you do the registry entry reboot. Depending on whether you gave your "Dave" account a password already you will either see the Logon welcome screen or the plain welcome screen. If you had a password already logon to that account and the go to settings/control panel/user accounts. Give THE Administrator account a password and if you haven't done so already your "Dave" account too. Tip: use different pictures for both of them because on the Logon welcome screen the description will be the same and without different pictures you will be unable to tell the difference between the two. Reboot again and on the logon welcome screen logon as the Administrator. This is when the Administrator folder is created in Documents and Settings. You will be a little disappointed at first because the account will not have your settings. Now logoff and logon to your Dave account and go to Files and Settings Transfer Wizard. Choose this as the computer you want to transfer files from. On the second panel use the "other" option where you can choose the "Dave" folder as the source and the destination folder you want to save these settings in. Now logoff and logon as THE Adminstrator. Reverse the process by choosing this is the computer you want to transfer files to. The rest you can probably figure out yourself.

Go to Local Users and Groups in Computer Management and click on Groups. You will see a list. Click on Adminstators and see what it shows you. If it shows Adminstrator and then you "Dave" then you are not the top Administrator. It seems strange but only "THE" Administrator gets that priveledge and not just "A" Administrator. Could be an oversight when coded. That was the same way it was on my system until I made myself "THE" Administrator. Also, if you have not done so yet, click on the link Jaclaz provided above for instructions on how to make "THE" Administrator account appear whether or not there are other users. When I did that and then logged in under that account, the columns I like to use appeared automatically. Thanks again Jaclaz for that link.

A very plausible explanation. Tried the method you suggested last night and that works a lot better than deleting or disabling all other user account to get the Admin logon. Also found out that my other idea works. I used File and Settings Transfer Wizard to copy all the settings from my "Default" user account to the "Admin" account in Docs and Settings and saved a lot of time resetting all those things. Learned a couple other things too. The S-1-5-21 accounts with the 25 digit long identifier in HKU are, by the looks of it, dynamically loaded into the registry according to the user that is logged on. That goes for HKCU too. After all this time I'm still finding new things out about XP.

Awesome. Thanks for that bit of info. Doesn't make sense the way they did it though. Maybe they thought some other user might try to logon as the administrator. But they would have to know the password anyway.

OK, I guess I should explain this better. You have to be logged in as the Administrator. If you have any other user accounts they have to be deleted because Windows does not show the Administrator account on the Welcome screen if there are any other user accounts. You also have to turn off the "Guest" account. You can check this in Computer Management under the "Local Users and Groups" folder. The Administrator account must also have a password or you don't get the logon Welcome screen, just the regular Welcome screen. I have no idea why they did it this way since how can you log in as the Adminstrator without it being shown on the Welcome screen? And as soon as you put back the other user accounts (if you have any) the Administrator account is again not shown. Some sort of catch 22. My situation is a little different than a clean install because I copied Millennium onto the drive that I was going to use for the XP install. I did this because I thought it would be easier for me if the install took as many settings as it could from Millennium and that would save me some time re-doing all those settings in XP. Because I did not have a user account in Millennium, the install created a default user account call "Default" in Documents and Settings. In the "Local Users and Groups" folder on my computer in the users folder is listed "Administrator - Built-in account for administering the computer/domain", "default - Account upgraded from Windows Millennium Edition" and "Guest - Built-in account for guest access to the computer/domain". So when I did all the above things I was able to set the columns the way I like them and it has stuck ever since.

The best I can figure is that the programmers felt that the search result column settings were a personal setting and not a global setting. Two other thing I noticed is that 1) the list of users is different between User Accounts in Control Panel and the Users and Groups folder in Computer Management. For me that might be because on this computer (I have 2) I installed XP over Millennium and the XP install gave me an account called Default in Documents and Settings and 2) when I left clicked on the Administrator account in the Users and Groups folder of Computer Management and I got the "What's This" pop-up, I decided to click on that just to see what it would say and it gave me an interesting piece of information. That the Administrator account is not shown on the welcome screen if there are other user accounts. Didn't know that. For me that means because I have the account called Default and also am shown as the Administrator too, when I log on I am logging on as Default...not the Administrator even though it uses the same password for both accounts. Currently, now that I know this, I am trying to figure a way to change this without losing all my personal settings. I already tried deleting the Default account and shutting down and reloging in as the Administrator and that part worked but it created a new folder under Documents and Settings called Administrator (which I expected) but my personal settings were lost. I did do a backup before this so I am back to where I was before this experiment. I did see the identifier it gave the Administrator account in the registry and I'm going to try a little registry trick of renaming my Default account folder (not the .DEFAULT folder) with the Administrators identifier (if the Registry Edito doesn't complain about this) and see what happens.

The answer to the question that I have seen asked before, including myself, that Explorer doesn't save the column settings in search results is that you have to give yourself a password, then logoff, shutdown the computer and then restart. I know that most of us are the sole user of our computer so why bother with setting a password but it does work. I came up from the 9x series and didn't bother with a password either. I just liked booting in and going but it's a tradeoff I'm willing to do since I usually do searches many times in a session but only have to enter a password once. Found the solution when I did a clean install on another computer. Hope this helps.

I'll look at that first chance I get. Thanks and have a Happy New Year.