System32\DRIVERS\pci.sys error

my husband has a compaq persario laptop that came with ME but he upgraded it to XP Pro. he recently updated his zonealarm & accepted the 15 day free trial. when the trial ended he began having problems with an error box popping up. he ran all his matience & a virus scan & found nothing. when the box came up last night it offered to send the error report to windows. the result of the report referenced dreamweaver having a corrupt file so he uninstalled dream weaver. then the same thing happened & it told hime to update his touch pad. now its comming up with a error stating his system32\drivers\pci.sys file is corrupt or missing. can this be fixed without reinstalling XP? we recently moved & can't find either the original disks that came with the puter or the XP disks.

 

It would be a very good idea to find the XP Cd or buy a new one. It would be a shame for you to be unable to solve simple problems or do a repair installation if the need arose. I'm sure a shop would charge you more than the cost of XP and not be as careful of your saved items as you yourself would.

That being said, I doubt that the pci.sys being corrupted or missing is the entire problem. But, just in case, I have uploaded XP's pci.sys PCI Plug and Play Enumerator driver for you. Unzip it, check its properties to ensure its authenticity, and copy pci.sys to both your system32 and system32\dllcache folders. An alternative is to check your dllcache folder to see if it contains a backup of pci.sys and copying that to the system32 folder.

http://users.adelphia.net/~abraxas/dl/pci.zip

If you had the CD, you could run a system file check and be sure all XP files were intact. In fact, you can still do this, but any XP files that are not contained in the dllcache will not be repaired/replaced without the CD. And you will have to click innumerable times for the check to continue. The System File Checker looks in the dllcache first before checking the CD.

Run: sfc /scannow
(and be prepared to do a lot of clicking ).