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From: Heck on 9 Jun 2010 09:29
This may be too off-topic. What's a group that's interested in the
internals of Windows 7 and fiddling with them more than this one?

Installed Electronic Arts' "Battlefield: Bad Company 2" on my XP
system. It helped open up my system to a bad trojan. Wiped the
drive, installed Windows 7. Reinstalled the game, it fouled up in
permissions: It wouldn't run except on the installer's account. I
laboriously and with considerable difficulty deleted all residue left
by the game and its DRM software, SecuRom. Reinstalled the game. This
time, it asked for the VC 2008 Redistributable Pack, which I had
removed in conjunction with removing VS 2008, after I installed VS
2010.

So, I reinstalled the 2008 redist, then reinstalled the game. That
was the end of my functioning Windows 7. After a minute or so of
activity on the desktop, the screen then the machine hung. Sometimes,
the machine hung in the logon stage, sometimes only after the task bar
appeared and disappeared, sometimes after a window was displayed then
closed.

After some exploration and experimentation, it seems to me the Desktop
Manager exe and code it depends upon has been trashed. When I turned
of Aero by setting my color resolution to 16 bits from 32, the problem
behavior ceased.

Restore point set before the various reinstallations, both of the game
and the redistributable pack files, did not restore my OS.
Reinstallation of video driver did not help. Neither reinstallation
of DirectX nor of Windows SDK helped. Repair subsystem, running both
from the system drive as well as from the installation disk, did not
find anything wrong and did not fix it by accident, either.

I like Aero, so, would you please suggest what drivers or dlls I might
try to replace, to recover from this. Or, alternatively, what group
or groups I should repost this in? (I tried about 10, but found them
all filled with junk only. Didn't find any designated for Windows 7,
either.)

Thanks
From: Jackie on 9 Jun 2010 09:57
Heck wrote:
> This may be too off-topic. What's a group that's interested in the
> internals of Windows 7 and fiddling with them more than this one?
>
> Installed Electronic Arts' "Battlefield: Bad Company 2" on my XP
> system. It helped open up my system to a bad trojan. Wiped the
> drive, installed Windows 7. Reinstalled the game, it fouled up in
> permissions: It wouldn't run except on the installer's account. I
> laboriously and with considerable difficulty deleted all residue left
> by the game and its DRM software, SecuRom. Reinstalled the game. This
> time, it asked for the VC 2008 Redistributable Pack, which I had
> removed in conjunction with removing VS 2008, after I installed VS
> 2010.
>
> So, I reinstalled the 2008 redist, then reinstalled the game. That
> was the end of my functioning Windows 7. After a minute or so of
> activity on the desktop, the screen then the machine hung. Sometimes,
> the machine hung in the logon stage, sometimes only after the task bar
> appeared and disappeared, sometimes after a window was displayed then
> closed.
>
> After some exploration and experimentation, it seems to me the Desktop
> Manager exe and code it depends upon has been trashed. When I turned
> of Aero by setting my color resolution to 16 bits from 32, the problem
> behavior ceased.
>
> Restore point set before the various reinstallations, both of the game
> and the redistributable pack files, did not restore my OS.
> Reinstallation of video driver did not help. Neither reinstallation
> of DirectX nor of Windows SDK helped. Repair subsystem, running both
> from the system drive as well as from the installation disk, did not
> find anything wrong and did not fix it by accident, either.
>
> I like Aero, so, would you please suggest what drivers or dlls I might
> try to replace, to recover from this. Or, alternatively, what group
> or groups I should repost this in? (I tried about 10, but found them
> all filled with junk only. Didn't find any designated for Windows 7,
> either.)
>
> Thanks

I think this is when one would like to say something like...
If you can take it apart, you can put it back together again... And if
you can't, it was you who messed with it. :)

I would just boot into safe mode and use an application called Autoruns
to disable drivers, servies and other applications that could be
conflicting. Especially leftovers of the DRM thing since you chose to
touch it, anti-virus, firewall or anything similar and see if it helps.
It seems like you would think of these things yourself though. If it
doesn't work, I would just reinstall/upgrade the intallation instead of
spending a great amount of time on trying to make sense of what's going on.

If you never find out the solution inside Windows, there's also a
possibility that this was caused was caused by the hardware one way or
another without going into details.

Maybe someone else here can find enjoyment in debugging strange problems. :)

--
Regards,
Jackie
From: Heck on 9 Jun 2010 22:47
On Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:57:37 +0200, Jackie <Jackie(a)an.on> wrote:

>Heck wrote:
snp
>>
>
>I think this is when one would like to say something like...
>If you can take it apart, you can put it back together again... And if
>you can't, it was you who messed with it. :)

I trust you enjoyed that.

>I would just boot into safe mode and use an application called Autoruns
>to disable drivers, servies and other applications that could be
>conflicting. Especially leftovers of the DRM thing since you chose to
>touch it, anti-virus, firewall or anything similar and see if it helps.
>It seems like you would think of these things yourself though. If it
>doesn't work, I would just reinstall/upgrade the intallation instead of
>spending a great amount of time on trying to make sense of what's going on.

I didn't have to run Autoruns to get that far: In Safe mode, the
problem doesn't appear. Safe mode, of course, runs in low resolution
as well as in a small color space, and that suspends the problem.

>If you never find out the solution inside Windows, there's also a
>possibility that this was caused was caused by the hardware one way or
>another without going into details.

Yes, this is a 6-year old machine. The hardware could be a
contributing cause.

>Maybe someone else here can find enjoyment in debugging strange problems. :)

I was hoping for suggestions from someone like that. I know I broke
it, but EA forced me to do it, damn them and their greedy,
uncooperative, software. Well, I backed up all I could and I'm ready
to reinstall the OS. What a pain. Thanks for your comments, just the
same.
From: Jackie on 10 Jun 2010 05:24
Heck wrote:
> I trust you enjoyed that.

I did, but please don't take it to heart. :)

> I didn't have to run Autoruns to get that far: In Safe mode, the
> problem doesn't appear. Safe mode, of course, runs in low resolution
> as well as in a small color space, and that suspends the problem.

I mean, you could go in there and disable those thing I mentioned, then
back to your main account.
One may wonder if it has something to do with your display drivers as
well but since it happened after you tried to remove the DRM files, I am
not sure. Maybe you can try to completely uninstall them before
installing them again.

> Yes, this is a 6-year old machine. The hardware could be a
> contributing cause.

Corrupted files could be the cause. Or there's still leftovers from the
DRM files. Maybe it changed some settings on installation that wasn't
set back when you removed the files.

> I was hoping for suggestions from someone like that. I know I broke
> it, but EA forced me to do it, damn them and their greedy,
> uncooperative, software. Well, I backed up all I could and I'm ready
> to reinstall the OS. What a pain. Thanks for your comments, just the
> same.

I am a little curious about how they forced you to do that. I have BC2
as well and it runs pretty well (perfectly, actually). I didn't touch
any DRM files (don't need to either).

--
Regards,
Jackie
From: Heck on 10 Jun 2010 09:13
On Thu, 10 Jun 2010 11:24:55 +0200, Jackie <Jackie(a)an.on> wrote:

>Heck wrote:
>> I trust you enjoyed that.
>
>I did, but please don't take it to heart. :)
>
>> I didn't have to run Autoruns to get that far: In Safe mode, the
>> problem doesn't appear. Safe mode, of course, runs in low resolution
>> as well as in a small color space, and that suspends the problem.
>
>I mean, you could go in there and disable those thing I mentioned, then
>back to your main account.
>One may wonder if it has something to do with your display drivers as
>well but since it happened after you tried to remove the DRM files, I am
>not sure. Maybe you can try to completely uninstall them before
>installing them again.

I reinstalled the display drivers, to no avail, so the problem's not
with them.

>> Yes, this is a 6-year old machine. The hardware could be a
>> contributing cause.
>
>Corrupted files could be the cause. Or there's still leftovers from the
>DRM files. Maybe it changed some settings on installation that wasn't
>set back when you removed the files.

I'm sure I removed all traces of the DRM, but, obviously, evidently, I
didn't recover or restore all the changes. The sign to me that I
removed all the DRM is that it asked me to input the key when I
reinstalled the game. On earlier attempts, I wasn't getting that
initial dialog.

Still, though, I don't think this is due to the DRM, I think it's the
game.

>> I was hoping for suggestions from someone like that. I know I broke
>> it, but EA forced me to do it, damn them and their greedy,
>> uncooperative, software. Well, I backed up all I could and I'm ready
>> to reinstall the OS. What a pain. Thanks for your comments, just the
>> same.
>
>I am a little curious about how they forced you to do that. I have BC2
>as well and it runs pretty well (perfectly, actually). I didn't touch
>any DRM files (don't need to either).

I was writing facetiously, but I do mean to blame their development
insofar as I could not get the game to run on my son's limited account
after installing it with my admin privileges.

So, for a while, he was playing from my account, then I uninstalled
it, gave him admin rights, then reinstalled it as him, which didn't
work either. And so on.

He really enjoys the game and I enjoyed watching him play it, too. I
tried, but I'm lousy at it and I don't want to train to get better. I
just enjoy watching him. He's disappointed he can't play right now
and I'm sorry, too. Nevertheless, I've wasted too much time on this
for my taste, but I'm still trying to accommodate him. So, due to
frustration and irritation, I phrased it the way I did.

You like the game, I take it? It does seem pretty good.
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