Explorer broken after uninstall

[gamb]

Dear all

I have a serious problem after I uninstalled XPize 4.7.

After the compulsory reboot my desktop including explorer.exe couldn't load. It says that it has problems with urlmon.dll and iertutil.dll - ordinal number something like that. manually copying these files back to the windows\system folder

I can run some programs using the task manager but basically that's it. I cannot even start the system restore program because it quits, giving the same error messages regarding the said DLLs.

If any of you have an idea how to solve this, please let me know!

developers: Is there a way I can revert the patching?

Uninstalling once again the package didn't work, also re-installing didn't merit in a running system

Cheers!

[W3bbo]

As stated before on these forums, XPize 4.7's uninstaller is unreliable and often causes problems, especially if SP3 has been installed (assuming it was an SP2 system when XPize 4.7 was installed). For reasons like the one you describe we don't recommend every uninstalling XPize 4.7 (why would anyone want to anyway? ).

I guess you'll have to reformat and reinstall Windows. There's nothing more I can do to help you, sorry.

[gamb]

well, I guess that's the root of all evil. I used to have xpize 4.7 for quite some time and then sp3 was installed. recently I upgraded to xpize 5R6 and tried to uninstall the old version and then the error came up.

isn't there any way to avoid re-installing windows? this sucks!

[gamb]

it would help me to know in which way system files were "res-hacked" and what the actual problem with previous versions of xpize was. in that case i might be able patch some files by myself

[W3bbo]

it would help me to know in which way system files were "res-hacked" and what the actual problem with previous versions of xpize was. in that case i might be able patch some files by myself

When XPize 4.7 was installed, it patched pretty much every single system file that contained UI artwork and made a backup copy of those files somewhere on your system.

When SP3 was installed, it replaced these patched files with Microsoft's official files (which still contain old UI artwork). XPize 4.7's uninstaller replaces the current file with the backup copy and performs zero validation (i.e. it will replace SP3 versions of files with the SP2 originals. Obviously this will cause problems).

After installing xpize 5R6 your SP3 system files will be patched again.

So if you uninstall XPize 4.7 at this point you'll see your 5R6'd system files replaced with MS's original SP2 files.

There is no "manual" way to fix this I'm afraid, the best resolution is re-installing Windows from scratch. Sorry.

(In my defence: XPize 4.7 was developed by Francisco (not me) and at the time there wasn't much of a hint of there being an SP3 for Windows. xpize 5's uninstaller is intelligent and will not 'restore' a system file if it is not exactly identical to how it was after being patched)