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Does anyone know why Dial-a-fix sometimes gets an "unspecified error" while trying to unregister MSXML3.DLL? It seems to be new because it's never done that in the past. Apparently you can immediately try it again and Dial-a-fix will then be able to unregister/re-register it. It's weird.

(Update: see the comments for a possible explanation. Short version: just run the same parts of Dial-a-fix again and you shouldn't get the error. If you still have trouble with Windows Updates, try clicking "Flush SoftwareDistribution".)

Superfail part 1
Superfail part 2

Thanks to astute reader Nate Coffey and Dial-a-fix, we've found another DLL registration bug.

The current version of wuaueng.dll provided to Windows 2000 service pack 4 clients has a bug in its DllInstallServer.

In the first picture is a "before" screenshot that shows that all of the SvcHost key values are here. This is a freshly installed Windows 2000 machine that only has Service Pack 4:

In this second picture, I have visited Windows Update, gotten the latest Windows Update client, closed my browser, and then unregistered the DLL using regsvr32 /u:

In this third picture, I have re-registered the DLL using regsvr32 /i, but it caused an error (0×80070057) and only one key was put back. The netsvcs key is lost at this point. In order to fix this, merge this default SvcHost key .reg file.

The error code 0×80070057 is E_INVALIDARG, or invalid parameters/arguments.

The current version of Dial-a-fix will accidentally trigger this because of the malformed DllInstallServer in wuaueng.dll. Once a new, fixed version of the Windows Update client is pushed out, Dial-a-fix will be able to help you again. I'll be filing this as a bug with Microsoft – I hope they fix it.

Edit: be sure to read Superfail part 2 for the solution for afflicted machines.

If you are asked for a password when removing Trend Micro PC-Cillin, open regedit, browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Trend Micro\PC-Cillin and either rename or remove the System sub-key. Then try the uninstaller again. It's just that stupideasy!

This doesn't work if you are already in the uninstaller being asked for the password and then remove you the key, so remove the key before starting the uninstall process.

Midas reports:

You can also use pcctool.exe for 2007 and older or tissprt.exe (or similar name) for 2008.

which will remove Trend Micro PC-Cillin without a password. You can find it in the installation directory.

This comment prompted me to download a program called Uniblue RegistryBooster. Kim Komando said it was good. _^Heh.

c|net has a quote blurb on the Uniblue website that says:

This easy-to-use tool lets you remove faulty Registry entries that slow down your computer.

Removing a kilobyte of cruft should net you what, a gain of 10 nanoseconds for every 15,000 value reads?*
_{*: Actual value may vary**
^{**: Variance not guaranteed}}

I also don't think removing registry keys is the start to solving your Windows problems, but I'm going to run it for science!

As soon as I launched it, it performed its whole system scan.

A total of 311 invalid Registry entries were found on your System. Click on "Repair Registry" to fix all entries.

On the Overview tab, it says my registry health is low. Uh oh, I should be seeing errors and crashing all of the time, then, right?

I don't know if it's a function of not being registered, but since the window cannot be resized (giant skinned window with Vista style minimize and close buttons) and there isn't a horizontal scrollbar in the results area, I can't read the full path to most of the keys so that I can verify the results. Well, you can read the log file though. It opens an HTML log from Uniblue's area of your user profile's Application Data folder in your default web browser and it contains all of the information you need, should you actually know what you're looking at.

It found quite a few missing ActiveX/COM+/DCOM/OLE objects, which is the largest group of "errors" any registry cleaner can find in your system. This is because ActiveX, COM, and OLE (which all store and retrieve information to/from HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT) are so frequently used and are so frequently damaged (in one way or another). This could happen if you move the file to another drive or folder or if a module crashed while trying to register or unregister itself. The majority of what Dial-a-fix does is register ActiveX/COM/OLE objects, such as the components that run Windows Update. (Dial-a-fix tells the modules to self-register, this way, Dial-a-fix does not have to know the exact registry keys and values needed to make a module work again.)

Almost all of the ActiveX/COM errors that registry cleaners find can be ignored. There are a few things registry cleaners can figure out that are harmful to the speed of your system, but they don't occur very frequently. If you had a file type registered to a program that exists on a mapped drive and that network share was down but still listed as a mapped drive, you might get slowdowns as Windows tries to figure out where the share is. Registry cleaners are also able to remove invalid OpenWith entries, which is a good thing to do just to tidy the list of broken icons and to save Windows from having to check for non-existent locations. A lot of keys chosen for removal just contain MRU (most recently used) paths to things I have accessed using whatever program the MRU list is for. Removing these keys isn't really going to "repair" your computer.

Still, for the average user, cleaning this cruft will probably not visibly impact performance to the point that such a program should scan your entire system every startup.

At least RegistryBooster isn't taking up a lot of memory.

Another problem with registry cleaners is that you're at the mercy of the database and program version you have. Compounding this is that each registry cleaner program is third-party, meaning they all can have potentially differing opinions on what constitutes an invalid entry. There is the potential to ruin your computer by removing things that need to stay — many a registry cleaner has had to come out with program fixes and registry patches for things erroneously removed. I would hate to be a tech support person for a registry cleaning program. I'm sure there a lot of irate people who:

• Have had things removed from their system that shouldn't be, and are having new problems because of it
• Have other problems such as hard drive and memory problems and will blame the company for problems with their computer because the last thing they remember using was the registry cleaner program
• Have other problems as mentioned above and corruption occurs after a registry clean because of interference from the faulty hardware
• Have problems that can't be solved by a registry clean (which is to say most problems) and are upset that this program has not improved the performance or stability of their machine

Here's an issue I've found already, and I'm not very far through my results log:
RegistryBooster wants to remove HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows Search\CrawlScopeManager\Windows\SystemIndex\DefaultRules\22 because it says "file:///c:\ " is a bad path. This isn't true – this is the format Windows Search uses for indexing rules. If I remove this stuff, I suspect Windows Search will forget how to search my system, and had I not read through the log, I would later wonder how it disappeared. I might not even connect its destruction with my use of a registry cleaner – another big problem. Obviously something has directed RegistryBooster to look here, yet it does not actually understand what it is seeing and recommending for removal.

When I chose to "repair" the registry entries, it told me I should make a backup, which is a good idea. The bad thing is that it is only going to delete all of the registry entries, not really "repair" them. What if the file can be found elsewhere on the drive? Should it scan my filesystem and put together the puzzle and point the key at the new location? It's probably difficult to decide when such a scan should be the answer, so instead of opts to delete every error that has been found rather than trying to fix it. Because of the endless possibilities, scanning for files and pointing erroneous keys to the findings is probably just as bad an idea as mass deletion.

I'm barely through the first few lines of the log and I have all of this to say – this should give you a clear indication of my opinion of registry cleaners. I'm giving this one a chance, but it seems like it's just like all the rest and has all of the same pitfalls as anything else.

I can give RegistryBooster one thing: it did find quite a lot of missing TypeLib entries that really are missing, although like I've said before, it's not really going to speed up my computer all that much. This is only a few kilobytes of text in my 35 megabyte registry.

I don't like that there isn't a "jump to value" context menu entry on each item in the results pane – it makes fact-checking take quite a bit longer.

I've also noticed that registry cleaners tend to find Explorer's "auto" file extension creation entries, and RegistryBooster is no exception. There's no point in removing auto entries as they will just come right back as soon as Explorer sees the file extension again.

It feels like it's very limited since I'm only testing the trial version, but I don't think I really need to see any more.

In the end, I can't really recommend this sort of program to anyone (no offense to Uniblue) and I did not end up removing any of the things it said I should. I can't really give it a 1-to-5 stars type rating, so I'll give it a rating of N/A.

There is one decent registry cleaner that I've found that generally does the same thing (finds COM junk and missing font entries, etc) and isn't too aggressive with its scans: CCleaner's Issues scanner. CCleaner's Issues scanner reminds me of one final point: registry cleaners don't take into account the things that they orphan from their first scan. After you remove 300 things from your registry, chances are that there is another 200 things that have become orphaned from the first sweep. If I ever wrote a registry cleaner (which I will not) I would have it check for "dependencies" and list them as sub-items of the main items, so that it basically says "if you choose to remove X, I'm removing Y also because it's orphaned by the removal of X".

*Anti-climactic cliffhanger ending*.

He's not really a doctor (unless you count that PhD from clown college) but he'll be posting here from time to time. Enjoy.

Twice in 24 hours I've come across "WinBudget" which is some garbage BHO (filename matrix.dll) that gets installed somehow. A few of our customers who don't even venture that deep into the internet (and I know for a fact they don't surf porn sites or download pirated software) got infected by it somehow. I'm guessing it might have been an Outlook/Outlook Express/Internet Explorer zero-day exploit or something.

That was ridiculously easy to remove using RogueRemover and Spybot, but neither were able to find the odd infection left behind:

If you search your drives for folders called 'bak' you may find backup copies of executables from several popular software packages such as Adobe (several products), Nero, Apple (iTunes and Quicktime), Incredimail, Realplayer, Java, and even Norton Antivirus. If you move the contents of each bak folder to its parent directory and overwrite, the infection is gone. Thanks, stupid virus, for making backup copies before infecting files.

The best way to find these folders is like this:
Start > Run > cmd.exe (to get a command prompt)
dir /a /b /s bak

You'll get a list of affected applications. Go into each 'bak' folder and move whatever is in there one level up.

cd bak
move *.* ..

(yes you want to overwrite)

Thanks, WinBudget, or whatever the fuck you are.

Edit: I also found out that WinBudget sticks one or more entries in Internet Explorer's trusted zone list. One is called whataboutadog (dot com) and one is whataboutarabit (sic) (dot com).

http://www.noooxml.org/petition

Sign the petition above to let ISO members know that they should not allow Microsoft's bastard XML document format to become an ISO standard. What the hell is wrong with you, Microsoft?

http://forums.techguy.org/all-other-software/609118-solved-dial-fix.html

Basically Dial- a fix .. Does nothing …. Very few cases .. it solves the problem

…and this gem…:

All this can be easily achieved by a batch file

I've seen stuff like this floating around the web before. It doesn't really faze me as it just proves the poster's ignorance.

Dial-a-fix started as a set of batch files which were long and ugly like devil_himself's list of DLLs. Batch language differs slightly between Windows versions, and so do DLL registrations. Obviously, Windows 9x can't register all of the same DLLs that Windows XP can. IE7 also changed a lot of DLL registrations.

After a few months of using multiple batch files for each issue set (Cryptography, Windows Installer, etc) I got tired of having to fix them whenever a new conditional interrupted the workflow (such as a new version of a DLL that is no longer registerable, or to add dependency checks for missing files that I didn't realize could be missing when I first wrote the batch) so I converted the entire project into actual compiled code. This way, I could use real logic instead of a weak batch engine, and support more platforms.

The main problem that I have with that thread is that the junior member penguin47 has said that Dial-a-fix has solved the problem and simply wondered how it works. I wish he had asked me or Lunarsoft.net, but what can you do? Fortunately, the "senior member" devil_himself let him/her know that Dial-a-fix does nothing at all and has implied that it can accidentally fix your problem sometimes. I love that at the end devil_himself stated that this can all be easily accomplished with a batch file. Did you expect penguin47 to have found or written one?

penguin47 found my program, and it fixed the problem easily – for free. What's so wrong with that? Sure, you can easily write a junk batch file that does similar things to Dial-a-fix, but why would you shit on a program that makes it ten times easier and works on multiple versions of Windows, checking for stuff your batch file could never check for? My guess is that devil_himself is not an actual bench technician or has never used Dial-a-fix. I can't imagine any other reason to avoid something that is free and works this well just because you have some kind of batch file pride.

Yes, Dial-a-fix tells you all of the basic commands necessary to perform the same operations (somewhat) in its tooltips but you must remember that there is not enough advanced logic in a batch file to match what Dial-a-fix does now (checking for dependencies, etc).

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/broken_windows_fixed_quick_with_dial_a_fix

How did I not notice that Dial-a-fix was mentioned on my FAVORITE no-bullshit magazine's online blog-thingy-or-whatever-the-fuck? Oh yeah, I don't have an up-to-date subscription and I don't read the online stuff of theirs, but I guess I need to start.

Click the Digg button once you get there. Then, cross-post on Slashdot so that the internet explodes.

This is the best review of Dial-a-fix I've ever seen. It's very clear that Mark Soper understands what Dial-a-fix is about and what is going on under the hood. Thank you 'Marcus Soperus' for your kick ass review.

Speaking of Dial-a-fix — I need to get to fucking work!

c't Offline Updater

I probably should have mentioned this long ago, as I've known about it forever: c't has created a program (well, set of AutoIt scripts) which downloads the Microsoft updates for the platform you choose and fashions it into a CD-ROM image (ISO) for you. Click the link above to see. This project is in line with the Microsoft's redistribution EULA, so it will not be receiving a takedown notice.

—

The Autopatcher group apparently never read any of the EULAs for the files they were redistributing and were thus 'cease-and-desisted'. Let that be a lesson to you: follow the EULA attached to Microsoft's files when you create a project such as this and don't be surprised if you are told to stop once you are breaking the rules.

A lot of folks are upset about how long it took Microsoft before the project was told to stop. I don't think the latent notice was malicious. I firmly believe that the "right person(s)" at Microsoft never caught wind of the Autopatcher project until now. By "right person(s)" I mean Microsoft's intellectual property watchdogs. A lot of people at Microsoft didn't mind the project – but that's because it wasn't their job to chase people down and tell them to stop. When enough support calls roll in from annoyed users of Autopatcher (who don't realize it's not Microsoft's job to fix Autopatcher's issues) the "right person(s)" eventually find out about it.

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