Freezing at Splash/welcome screen + Install Freezes

Dear All,
The error message above can come up for a variety of reasons and a few solutions are offered below:

I will put this first as it refers to the latest situation in Windows Vista Home Premium:


Just in case there are any of you that come upon a situation that I have experienced on Vista (Home premium) I will describe it and the solution.

Sidekick starts to load and you get the loading window and after a few of the little blue blocks come up, it freezes and will not go any further.

Do not panic, I have found that this will happen if you have opened a media file that no longer exists.

The solution is to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to bring up the Window that offers you the option to
"Start Task Manager".
Do the above and then click on that option and then look down the list of PROCESSES for
1. sidekick.exe(if you are running Internet Sidekick) or
2. SIDEKICK.EXE if you are running Sidekick98
Select the process and choose to END it.
That will shut down Sidekick and then make sure that no instances of Windows Media Player are running visibly and then check the list for wmplayer.exe and end that process.
Go ahead and re-start Sidekick.

Next

If you ever have to restore backed-up data that has been written to disk(CD) then make sure, before you try to open it in Sidekick that you re-set the attributes of
ALL the files from Read-Only.
The easiest way to do this is to restore them into a folder on the desktop and then select all files in that folder and then right-click and untick the read-only attribute.
This is necessary as Sidekick will freeze at the splash screen/Welcome screen if the Calendar that it has open is a read-only Calendar and if that calendar is set as the default opening view of the program in Tools|preferences|General.

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This solution from CaptCJJ:

A situation arises with Symantec(Norton) and if you disable it during the install process it will allow Sidekick to complete the install process and you can then re-enable Symantec.

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Howard Lefkowitz has pointed out the following to me:

Since Internet Explorer 7 it appears there is a problem with a re-installation freezing
If you are using IE 7 and the Active X control is set to off, an install will fail/freeze if you re-enable Active X Controls you can proceed and then reverse the IE7 change afterwards.

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Member ray52 offered this solution as well and I quote him:

I was able to solve both the problem of the installation freezing and the problem of the program freezing during the opening splash by pressing control/alternate/delete to bring up the Windows Task Manager in Windows XP Home, clicking the Processes tab, highlighting "GoogleToolbarNotifier.exe" and clicking "End Process".

Any other solutions please let me know and I will credit you here.
Thanks all.