My trip to Windows hell...and back

For some reason, probably related to an uninstall/reinstall problem in the past, Norton SystemWorks (formerly known as Norton Utilities) wasn't running properly on the system in question, even though Norton AntiVirus seemed to be running fine. I doubt I had been infected with a virus, but just to check I went to the Panda Software Web site to use its free online virus checker. Make that "tried to use" since my machine froze about halfway through the scan.

I unplugged all the peripherals, save the mouse and keyboard, but to no avail. I also uninstalled some unnecessary applications. I went into MSCONFIG and turned off some startup items and still the system kept freezing up.

Microsoft's online Knowledge Base has helped me in the past, but only when I was able to precisely describe my problem. "Hangs for no reason" doesn't seem very precise.

What was wrong with this computer? I was not at all certain. I knew I would be able to fix it, using if I must the big gun of upgrading from XP Home to XP Pro, which has solved problems in the past, or as a last resort doing a factory reinstall of the OS. Perhaps I would even need to wipe the disk and start over, although reinstalling all the applications would be really painful.

That I couldn't simply tell Windows to reload the OS and fix itself while leaving apps installed makes me mad, though I suppose that's the problem System Restore is supposed to solve. And it sometimes does, but not for this problem.

At one point I thought a piece of code might have gotten corrupted somehow. Or maybe it was something in the Registry, the dismal swamp of Windows, which was freezing me up. In fact, when I have strange Windows problems my first guess is that the Registry's at fault, although a full freeze isn't too common.

Whoever developed the concept of the Registry -- which contains information about how programs work with one another and the operating system -- deserves a special place in, well, you know. Not heaven. Programs are very good at making changes to the Registry but pretty poor at removing them when the program is uninstalled. There are whole books written about the Registry and how to muck with it. My advice to most users is to never touch the Registry yourself. That's what Norton WinDoctor, which is part of SystemWorks, is for.

So what did I do? I uninstalled the remnants of Norton SystemWorks. This required a trip into RegEdit, something I don't like to do. Then I reinstalled the app and used its one-button fix to see what could be done to repair my machine. It found no viruses but 67 bad shortcuts and 157 defective Registry entries, which it then went on to fix.

The good news is that after running WinDoctor -- which said it was able to fix all the errors -- the machine has been running for 15 hours without crashing. This is much better than when it routinely crashed between 3 and 5 minutes after booting.

Since WinDoctor seemed to have solved the problem, I can make what medical doctors call a "differential diagnosis" -- a technical term for "informed hunch" -- that the Windows Registry, seat of all evil, was to blame. Hopefully setting WinDoctor to run on a regular basis will prevent future problems, as it seems to do on my other machines.

Hearing this tale of woe, a good friend offered this simple solution: never install software on your computer. What I think she really means is install as little software as you can get away with and then don't mess with it.

That's not an option for someone who writes about software and, frankly, I should be able to install and uninstall apps all day without destabilising the OS. I should also be able to move applications from one drive to another or from one machine to another without a complex uninstall/reinstall routine. And, of course, if Microsoft can build something as trouble-prone as the Registry, perhaps it could also provide a set of free tools for fixing it.

As much as I love Norton SystemWorks and as highly as I recommend it, should I really have to buy third-party software to solve Microsoft's problem? I don't think so.