dfrease

No progress last night. The inuse.exe utility requires a dll file that is not on the PC (sfc.dll). I'm not sure if this is just missing, or if it is not an NT dll. Need to research that a bit more. The name sounds familiar.... like maybe it was a casualty of a browser-hijacking cleanup initiative from some time ago. Anyway, I would still be quite happy to hear anyone's thoughts on the original problem or any of these mini-quests. I know there's not a lot of folks still holding onto NT like I am. It's probably going to be a couple days now, before I can try anything new. Thanks! D.

OK... no sooner than I said I couldn't find anything, did I come across a prospective answer. I've been wading through google search results whenever I had a chance today... finally came across a utility called INUSE. It looks like its made to order for my task... replacing locked system files in NT & W2K. (The link is to the MS Knowledge base article and the tool can be downloaded from there.) Of course this probably isn't going to fix my problem, but at least it's something new to try until I can get some more feedback. One of the theories I had about what might have caused this problem in the first place, was that I was trying to install some new software a couple weeks ago. It was GPS map-creating software, which required a USB to interface with the GPS. I know NT doesn't support USB, but I was kinda hoping that maybe I could still play around with the software at least... well no dice on that. The software partially installed, but then bombed out when trying to install the USB driver... which it turns out was mandatory for the software to work. I un-installed it, but never rebooted (I don't think) until this past weekend. So maybe that install had put an overlay of this dll on the restart... and thats when all the trouble started. I'm still a little pessimistic, though, because I would have thought that repairing it with the NT repair utility (even if that is regressing it back before SP 6a) would have corrected the problem... but I guess I'll find out for sure later tonight. I'll post my findings in the morning. D.

Windows NT doesn't have a "Safe Mode" or equivalent. At least not that I'm aware of. I do assume that there is some way to do this though... any install program that updates .dlls needs to be able to set up something like this... but I haven't had any luck finding the right keyword to search on. If you type in dll into any search engine, you get a few billion hits... mostly garbage advertisements.

Thanks, I was thinking the same thing myself, however when I try to run the service pack, it errors out on with the same error message about the ADVAPI32.dll. The error occurs on "Update.exe", which I assume is the NT service for applying SPs and other upgrades. I'm not sure how I can get around this. I also was able to get a SP 6 version of ADVAPI32.dll. I was hoping that I could just overlay it in the system32 directory, but the file is in use by Windows, so it won't let me. I'm sure there has to be a way to do this... would anyone have any suggestions on how to do this?

Hi All, I'm having a problem with my old dinosaur PC, which is running Windows NT 4.0 (sp 6a). On start-up, several NT services are failing, giving the following message: The procedure entry point MakeAbsoluteSD2 could not be located in the dynamic link library ADVAPI32.dll I didn't make a list of what specific services were erroring out, but they appear to be semi-critical ones, as the computer is nearly crippled. Most things run EXTREMELY slow. For example... NT Explorer takes 2-3 minutes (not exagerating) to open, and another 2-3 minutes to process any click to switch directories and etc. Other things seem to be unaffected (speed-wise)... MS Office stuff runs, but gives some minor warnings, other things that require the startup of NT services (like dial-up or CD burning software) fail, giving the same message as above. It appears to me that somehow this ADVAPI32.dll got corrupted, since all of the error messages are referencing it. I tried repairing the dll through the NT tool, but that did not fix the problem... The repair software identified hundreds (thousands?) of other system files (dlls and other) that do not match the original CD... but I am assuming that this is because they were updated when I applied Service Pack 6a. I tried to re-apply SP 6a, but I got the same error message as above, for the "update.exe" service. Anyway, I'm kind of at a stand-still right now. I'm just looking for suggestions on what to try next. I had thoughts of using the repair service, to correct all of the system files with differences... which I assume is the equivalent of un-applying the service pack... and then re-applying, if that fixed the problem... but I'm a little bit worried that that might hose things up even further. I'm also wondering if this could possibly be a registry related issue... or maybe I just need to find a SP 6a version of ADVAPI32.dll and overlay what's on there now? Any thoughts questions suggestions, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! D.