Restore locked in disable plus other issues

I'm working on my boss's computer. It's a Dell box with ME. He upgraded to highspeed cable in December and immediatly we got a ton of ads. I cleaned the system of as much malware as I could find with Ad Aware, Spybot S&D and HJT(he never uses antispy/virus ware, too lazy). At that time I discovered the System Restore was stuck in "disable ". It would not enable SR and I could not adjust the SR file size. Another help board suggested running scanreg /fix and it did fix the SR. Got everything working good. Fast forward a month. My boss didn't run any antispyware (no suprise) and suddenly it's all reinfected with a load of junk. While deleting spyware the computer locked. On reboot I found the SR locked in "disable" again. I tried scanreg /fix again in both safe mode and normal and nothing changed. I went on to delete as much as the malware I could find and tried scanreg /fix again. No change. After locking up several more times and rebooting SR decided to work. It restored the system to a saved restore in 03. Again the comuter was loaded with spyware and settings for long gone software. Cleaned it all up (again) but now there are 2 other issues. When Control Panel or "C" drive is opened, the window is completely blank. It does say in the bar at the botton 33 objects but none are shown. In safe mode though, both windows open with all the correct icons. The other issue is with IE. I have the Active X scripts enabled for safe sites but they don't work. Websites come up with messages like Java or Active X needs to be enbled, etc. My boss can't log on to his bank because of that which is not good . Sorry about the long post but I thought it might help to have as much info as possible. Thanks.

 

Hello Pronto,

IE:

You can try the following - repair the current version, the option is in the Add/Remove applet (one of the tabs).

You can uninstall it and install either the same version or upgrade later 5.x version http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/32bit or my choice would be an upgrade to 6.0 sp2 http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx especially given your Boss's habits, 6.0 is inherently more secure.

SR:

It's probably hopelessly corrupt by now. Move the slider to zero and reboot, the system will establish an initial restore point.

For the future, when you have trouble with restoring, the following is my canned response:

System Restore doesn't work:

One reason - the space allocated to System Volume Information is filled to the maximum which is 12% of Drive space. Neither XP or WinME handle this situation well.

To make room: right click on My Computer > Properties > System Restore tab and for the Monitored drive > settings. Move the slider left to 6% and reboot. This will make room for the Restore Operation. Afterwards, reset the slider back to 12%.

For ME, it's in System > File System tab.

Let us know how you make out.

Regards - Charles

 

I thought about doing that to IE. For SR, the slider is not highlighted since SR is stuck in disable. I cannot change the setting.

 

If you would to clear out the Restore folder, boot the computer with an ME boot floppy, and do these two commands.
smartdrv
deltree c:\_restore
Type a Y that you want to delete.