Broken *.EXE problem in Vista

[DarkStar]

Hi, all.

My boss and I are having some major problems here.

A client brought a laptop in, and nothing is working. We clean some viruses off his laptop but now no *.exe files will open.

We can't open regedit. We can't even use the Vista DVD to repair the installation.

If we try to add a *.reg file, it just hangs.

Is there anything we can do to get this working? What we really want to do is perform a 'repair install' on the system (the same way XP does it)

[Monty]

prime had a smilar problem.

Best bet is a completely clean install of the system.

[Prime]

You may have a variant of whatever nasty got hold of my PC on tuesday. Malwarebytes couldn't detect it, Trend Micro House call couldn't detect it. Run a scan with both and see if it finds anything. Avast 5 is also proving very reliable and fast.

Whatever nasty infected me, systematically and somewhat randomly ate chunks of installed programs starting with Adobe reader 9. It crippled Trend Micro 2008 and when I booted into safemode to do a virus scan, it refused to launch. It ate the *.exe files for Google Chrome and Paint.net, sporadic parts MS Office 2003 and disabled Opera Web Browser. I backed up and formatted. It was faster than waiting on Housecall and more effective.

Check if the .exe files still exist? Open a folder that should have an application in it like Office or Adobe reader and see if the exe files are actually there. Alternatively, click on a shortcuts and if it tells you that it can't find the application, check the directory to see if its there.

I suggest you back up his email file (.pst) and his documents and what ever files he needs on an external drive and disconnect it. Then as Monty said, do a format and reinstall. Once thats up and running, load an AntiVirus and update it, Then boot into safemode and plug in the external drive with the backups on it and scan them from within safemode to check they are not harbouring nasties, waiting to reinfect the clean drive.

[Frozenfireside]

Put it in another machine that has a decent antivirus in it like NOD32 or Kaspersky, back up the date and format.

Edit: Then when you have reinstalled install a decent antivirus!