looks like the registry is going screwy...

[pentium]

Fater many hours of work I was halfway through configuring and fully installing all the hardware and software for my new dual PII system when the unthinkable happened.

I had finished installing the creative MPEG decoder card and was powering the system on and was finishing boot.
It first started with an error window after login:

Error loading mmsys.cpl
Invalid access to memory location

Noticing that my sound control panel was gone, I checked the device manager and shure enough my sound card was having a problem. the problem was that the registry was corrupted. That was it.
I then tried to remove the bad driver and was halted almost at once:

Windows could not load the installer for MEDIA. Contact your hardware vendor for assistance.

It then gave another window saying that it could not be removed and took me back to the device manager. I thought of a bad driver so I opened IE and almost instantly it froze up.
I had to end it and then I kept on looking around. I then went to the administrarot control panel and this time the entire control panel froze and ending it caused explorer to reload.

Now i knew something was wrong.
I had not yet installed norton system works and so I popped the install cd in and when autorun started I got this:

The application failed to initilize properly (0xc0000005). Click OK to terminate the application.

I then tried an older copy of system works and got the same error.
I then opened my computer and tried manually opening the setup but after a moment, my computer froxe and I had to end it and make explorer reload.
I then tried windows explorer and once again it froze up.

I finally made success by manually running norton system doctor off the cd.
It meant I had to open the command window and manually locate the program.
After it was done testing. I fixed the errors it found (not many since no modules were installed on the system to make a complete scan) and then restarted.
Once again I got the error involving mmsys.cpl and once again, every program froze one way or another.

Knowing these types of errors they ARE registry problems and I don't know what the hell caused them. I was using drivers designed for windows NT for the sound card but after I removed all the cards I installed, programs were still freezing and complaining about memory locations.
The installer for the MPEG card driver closed complainging about a corrupt dll and that something was i the memory location it needed to use. I also had safe mode hang while booting and both sticks of ram passed all memory tests.

So I pretty much can't do anything now and I do not want to reinstall windows. It took two hours just to install all the updates and software needed to get most of the hardware configured and I have not even started with installing software.

[pentium]

Re: looks like the registry is going screwy...

It turns out the drivers themselves were the problem.
I replaced my Vibra 16XV card with a spare AWE 64 and using my driver cd I was able to install the proper drivers. After a restart everything cleared up and I was off and running again. I can't believe a single bad driver caused so many problems.

[bgavin]

Re: looks like the registry is going screwy...

Use GHOST when you build a system, so when it craps out you have a safety net under you. Working the high wire without a safety net is always dangerous.

If you suspect hardware, etc, another solution is test build your machine under VMWare. The more I use it, the more I like it. VM saved me a ton of CDs during my 3-day marathon to build an unattended XP Pro cdrom with all my registry tweaks.