Science Forums 2

[Boerseun]

Checkit...

My stepdad's got a laptop, and for the last couple'o days, he can't run anything on it at all.

So I took it, and being the awesomely kind dude that I am, promised him I'll fix it. Of course.

I then came across the oddest screw-up I've ever seen in a very long time, and I can't for the life of me figure it out.

Windoze starts up beautifully, everything right, sweet and dandy, with all the services starting like they should. No issues, no problems in the event log. Until you try to execute a program. Now, you click on any icon on the desktop, or you follow any link through the Start menu, and all that happens, is that the mouse pointer briefly changes into an hourglass, and that's it. Changes back into a pointer, and that's the end of it. No single program executes. So, after lots of struggling, I found the problem. The Task Scheduler Service supposedly kicks off svchost.exe, right? Not so in this machine. This machine kicks off spoolsv.exe when the Task Scheduler is supposed to run. Spoolsv.exe being the Print Spooler, there's no method in this particular madness. And you need the Task Scheduler to organise processing time for apps, otherwise they won't run.

Now, the little box with the path to the file to be kicked off when any particular process needs to run, is greyed out. I can see the path, but I can't edit it - and that's with full admin rights. And what should be pointing to svchost.exe is pointing to spoolsv.exe. Which is wrong.

Anybody seen this before?

That particular path should be registered in the registry - and if I can't panelbeat the path to svhost.exe in the registry, I'm gonna have to rebuild the entire box - which I don't actually want to do...

Advice?