No icons listed within add/remove programs

Hello all, I'm having problems with my pc and wanted to track down each one, so firstly...

When I open my add/remove programs icon, the tray is completely empty. There is still the cheesy menu bar on the left of the window, but no programs are listed. If I change it to classic view, nothing happens when I click the add/remove icon.

Any ideas of what I can check? I know how to get around a computer, only in the way that if I'm given direct instructions, it's no problem. However, I'm basically clueless as to what I'm doing. If it's something like "check the registry ", can you tell me just how I would do that?

 

Ok thank you, I'm at work now so when I get home I'll add my specs as best as I can and try it out. Hopefully it'll work, because that's the first major step I need to overcome to get this thing working right, before I decide to just restore the entire thing from the boot disk.

 

So it looked like it was a no go... I did get the "DllRegisterServer in Appwiz.cpl succeeded" message, however, then quickly realized that rebooting was a part of this; It hasn't fully shut down or rebooted in years for me, just gets to the "shutting down" blue screen and is frozen at that point until I do a soft shutdown myself. Needless to say, the icons were still not in the popup.

My specs are mostly in there, so I suppose my next question would be How do I get shutdown and reboot to work properly?

 

Woops! Specs display on.

Thanks Evan, I'll try that when I get home again, and the link from Microsoft support looks like exactly what I'm seeing. I'll be back tonight!

I'm running Firefox instead of IE, I believe I'm up to date on their version, or at least very close. What I'm hoping for is that getting just this part functional will open the door to fix my other problems. It's not in terrible shape, just horribly slow and will freeze up, not shutdown or reboot on it's own, and (possibly unrelated) will not connect to iTunes (which would be nice). I have audio mixing software on there and wanted to replace it will something better, but won't dare try that until it gets cleaned up since I know that software uses a lot of space.

I did get a trial version of Advanced System Optimizer, which cleaned maybe 20 of my registry errors, however there's (sit down for this one) over 700 MORE registry errors. Would getting a full version of a program like this to fix all of them help? Or do I have a chance not spending money and cleaning up a bunch on my own, without being a 100hr process of going over code?

 

Gotcha, check. I tried running the string of commands you have listed, and they almost all worked, except for the three "regsvr32 Program Files\Common Files\System\......etc" commands. They failed, with "the specific module could not be found ".

Once I can get this part working, I plan to uninstall as much as I can and reinstall what I actually use (after backing up my files for those), and ASO was certainly not going to be a part of it. With what I have going on, it definitely made things run slower as soon as it was downloaded.

Got another idear sir?

 

I ran them each in a row, and they all had a dll-whatever succeeded message (I can't remember specifically, it's too early), except for the aforementioned 3 commands. I've been using Firefox instead of Internet explorer, and it has XP Service Pack 2.

 

Alrighty I will update to sp3. I read the article, but didn't want to go too much into it, as I don't know just how to "check the registry ". In the link, it says

"At the prompt, type REGSVR32 APPWIZ.CPL. If this fails, look for the registry entries that are listed below. To resolve this issue, check the registry for the following keys and values. Re-create any missing keys or values. Note that these keys use the system drive letter. You may have to adjust these entries to match the configuration of your computer. "

How do I know if it fails?

And I apologize if I sound a bit on the uneducated side, believe it or not I do have a degree that covered all this, but I focused on the electrical engineering and have not had a reason to use the computer side in many years so I'm still rusty.

 

ALRIGHTY! So I checked the registry listed in the article, found 2 entries different, changed them, and speed was picking up quickly. Started at the beginning again, but still no add/remove programs. However, after checking the keys "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Management\ARPCache ", I found them both saying "Default" = "Value not set" (if I am interpreting that correctly, under "Name" and "Data" respectively).

SP3 is on the way, if it will let me.

 

Oi vey. So I tried t download sp3. IE 8 is required. Downloaded IE 8, ran the installation, it goes through the "download" process, then when installing updates for IE8, it freezes up, still on the installation screen.

Still though, things are running faster, and I am finally able to ctrl+alt+dlt the installation program right away instead of waiting eons for it to possibly unfreeze.

I tried downloading sp3 directly, rather than through IE8, and about 10min into the installation, the download actually failed (the first download "failure" message I've ever seen).

Since we're going backwards instead of forwards at this point, should I get sp3 downloaded onto a CD?