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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Earlie who wrote (198841)	10/21/2002 7:51:05 PM
From: mishedlo	Read Replies (10) \| Respond to of 436258

Here is my MSFT tale. Bear with me ok? Somehow over the weekend internet explorer got corrupted. Do not ask me how but it did. Some interaction of it and my satelite service I think. Kept getting "Page cannot be displayed" Was on the phone with my satelite provider for 2 hours trying to resolve the issue. Finally he gave up and told me unless and until I could access the internet thru a phone line they would not help me. It was and IE problem. This sounds harsh and I was pissed but it was essentially correct. Spent hours researching the problem on another PC. Dozens of problems out there on the issue. I had my original Windows 2000 disk but was loath to reload it, because the last time I did my machine did not run for 3 days. Screwed up all the special DELL drivers that it took me days to convince DELL to resend to me. Checking on my PC that worked, there were all kinds of "support #" links on Microsoft but none of them were MSFT. MSFT essentially pawned off the problem to whoever you bought the PC from. I called DELL, but DELL would not help me cause it was past 30 days. Finally I did manage to find a MSFT phone number and called it but they wanted $245/hr to help me. Sht this could take 100 hours for all I knew. Anyway I thought I could download software from one machine and transfer it to the other to fix it. Downloaded IE 6 install on my PC that works. Put it on the one that did not. It would not load because it said I had "an installation in progress" and needed to reboot. Rebooted 4 times and still the same message. Spent another 2 hours on the PC that works trying and implementing suggestions to fix that problem. Finally I got one to work. Had to delete some "pending update" registry entries using regedit pgm. Did that. Hooray! Setup started to run. One "small" problem. To complete it had to have access to the internet thru Internet Explorer. This is what happens when MSFT took a perfectly lousy program and made it 100% lousier by purposely imbedding it into the core software. Can not get there from here. Totally Impossible. No other choice I thought. Out with the reload disk. Select "reapply" rather than cold install hoping for the best. I selected specific manual proceses. It loaded but stopped twice with errors. My heart stops cause I envision a totaly F'd up system. Then I received a "C: Drive is corrupt message". Now I am positive I am Fd. This is probably an hour into the reinstall process. Try the reinstall again, selecting auto process. Sweating bullets. I select reinstall rather than install because I do not want to wipe out my entire hard drive. Fails with errors again. I am sure I am totally F*d at this point. Try one more time this time with Manual (but selecting everything). Not sure how this should differ from the default automatic, but low and behold it installs clean although it objects to my NVDIA driver and asks me if I want to continue. I am positve my drive is indeed NVDIA so I tell the damn thing to ignore the issue. Low and behold it completes. Fantastic. I have successlly wiped out god knows how many patches but at least my machine runs. Unfortunately, interent explorer does not. Spent 20 hours on this and was dead tired. Although I have a PC, Internet Explorer (IE) is still not working. I am also back to a system minus god kanow how many patches. Monday the process resumes. I get the bright idea to buy Netscape Navigator and use that to download what I need to fix IE. Heck, might just decide to keep it permanently. Went to three places nearby but they do not carry it. Went home after wasting more time, to the yellow pages and called a local computer store. Asked if they had Netscape and was told no. Asked the guy if he was a technician and he said yes. Not sure how often you get a technical guy answering the phone but I described the problem and he said he had IE 5.5 in house on a CD and would try loading that for me. Brought in the PC, he attempted to load 5.5 but got the same damn problem of "update in process". Fortunatly I remembered how to navigate to the correct registry key (6 layers deep), and deleted a "pending update" key. IE 5.5 loaded and low and behold I could access the internet (there) over a T1 line at the shop. In exchange for me telling him how to find and kill the registry key, he only charged me $20. A veritable bargain (probably for both of us). Was happy until I got home and still kept getting "page could not be displayed". My local IP provider said the 5.5 install probably messed up setting that it needed to run. Cleared off the settings and finally, for the fiurst time in 3 days could get at a web page. Unfortunately not thru satelite. Called back sattelite company. After another two hours figured out that the problem was 5.5 install and/or my reloading of Windows 2000 from the original disk, set encryption level to 64bit instead of 128bit. Had to install latest MSFT Windows service pack to fix that problem. Well on regular phone line that takes 90 minutes to download (and somehow my local IP connection stayed up for the entire thing). Loaded service pack. Hooray that fixed encrytion level to 128bit. Satelite still not working. Called sattelite company again. That service pack upload wiped out setting that I needed to modify. Modification complete. 60 hours later and probably 25 hours of my time was spent just because MSFT imbedded IE into the operating system instead of leaving it as a standalone application. Some Fun. M