Free PC Support

[Tinwolf]

Hi all, new boy here.

As of today we have 2 XP pro machines that are behaving very strangely. The first thing reported was the network not working on one of them but on closer investigation the majority of automatic services are not started on these machines and when you try to start them you get the "error193:0xc1" notice.

The situation is the same in safe mode regardless of logon used.

Both PCs are protected with McAfee viruscan and running a check in safe mode finds nothing amiss.

I did find a comment on the internet that it`s caused by a folder called "program" on the root of the D drive and on one PC sure enuff the folder was there on the CD drive (no CD in the PC how weird is that?) I renamed the folder and it`s now vanished but the problem remains . I`ve searched (manually because search isn`t working) for any other folders called program or common (that from a microsoft site) but found nothing.

And before anybody asks things like hijackthis etc won`t help because the installer won`t start.

Any ideas?

[Tinwolf]

I managed to get hijackthis running.
The strange thing it`s showing is that each of the unstarted automatic services are displaying "unknown owner" e.g. DHCP client.

[demdike]

get yourself a bootable live CD such as Knoppix or VistaPE

Go t a working machine and copy the file svchost.exe onto a pen drive or floppy. You will find this file in the folder c:\windows\system32

Put the bootable live CD and then pen drive into the faulty machine, and then start it up, making sure the machine boots off the live CD
Once the machine is running, copy svchost.exe to c:\windows\system32 on the faulty machine

remove pend drive and cd, and restart

Machine will boot into windows as normal. Once its up and running you MUST then immediately go online with the McAfee software and get it updated to the latest patch level
That should be the end of the problem

McAfee have repeatedly said in their rpess releases that only their business-level products were affected by this glitch. Its not true: I've had several home-user customers hit by it as well

[Tinwolf]

Insert emoticon with little yellow smiley face going "woop woop"

Thanks demdike that`s chuffing fixed it!
I went into the PCs in safe mode and replaced svchost.exe (I had to do it in DOS as copy/paste wouldn`t work) rebooted and hey presto fixed.

The only thing now is one of the PCs has the RPC service disabled and I can`t get into properties to restart it, properties and double clicking just isn`t doing anything at all on this PC.

[demdike]

copying in safe with a command prompt as you did is the other option - but most people don't know DOS so I tend to avoid telling them to do that

As regards the error on one machine - simply run a system restore back to before it all went wrong, and then update MaAfee again. No point trying to waste time tracking down the RPC problem

[Tinwolf]

I ran the system repair tool and ENABLEd the rpcss

Bingo

Thanks again demdike.