Windows Critical updates crashed computer

[isabelayalabina]

Hi
Has anyone heard of Windows Critical updates crashing Windows ME? My aunt is running Me, and had not run Windows Update for a while. I ran it for her and upon rebooting her PC, it froze up on the Windows ME screen. I kept trying to reboot by using ctrl/alt/delete, but no help, and even tried safe mode. Then I saw a screen that said that windows was missing a dll file from C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\SYSTEM\SHLWAPI.dll, and that windows needed to be reinstalled. I called Gateway and they said that the updates corrupted some window files. So we were instructed to reinstall Windows from Gateway's restoration disks.
Has this happened before to anyone's knowledge? We are now afraid to run Windows Updates.

Thanks
isabela

 

[wolluf]

I don't know if this is common for Gateway (does their website have any details/warnings?) - but would suggest that there's something seriously wrong with how they set up ME if this happens (it suggests they're replacing some of MS's system files for ME, so if you get an update that puts back a MS version you have a problem. I thought that was illegal!)

 

[nate901]

I got a critical update cd direct from Microsoft and installed the updates on my ME machine. It boots up definitely some things are screwed-up/changed and I wish I had not installed it. I definitely believe what Gateway said about the update corrupting some Windows files. I'm having problems with Msgsvr32 not responding sometimes and Windows Explorer acting strange. Plus when online pages take longer to load and sometimes hang up. Can Microsoft do anything right? I used 'Scanreg /restore' to revert to an earlier registry setup before I installed the updates and that caused more problems so I had to use it again to re-load a registry after the updates. At this point not sure what I'm going to end up doing. Hopefully you have a boot floppy you created that will allow you to go into Safe mode. In Win 98 they had a the system file checker SFC.exe that could check and reload corrupted Windows files but I don't think that's in Win ME. It didn't seem to solve problems anyway when I used it a couple of times on Win98. That's probably why they took it out of ME. Rather than fix the file checker they chose to remove it maybe. Good 'ol Microsoft.

 

[nate901]

If you (and I) have to re-install Windows ME this webpage will help with that task.

http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,111652,pg,2,00.asp

 

[itexprt]

TOO MANY UPDATES WILL CRASH YOUR COMPUTER