Dear Mr. Denny,
I have been working on this computer now for a few hours and I have made some progress on it.
First, the registry was corrupted after the previous technician did the virus scan and spyware work on it. Because of that, the MMC was unable to start, run or allow me to do anything in the administrative tools applet.
So, I ran a repair on windows XP and that fixed that. When I went into the services applet, all the MSSQL services were set to "disabled." I enabled them all and now need to reconnect to the database which is stored on the local computer, not the peer-shared computer in the other office.
Another thing is, I have had an opportunity to read through the event log in detail and seems as though the major problem is missing registry keys, specifically relating to user login profiles. On the 12th, when the problem began, there were several copies of this in the event log:
Event Type: Warning
Event Source: Userenv
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1517
Date: 8/12/2009
Time: 9:57:14 AM
User: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
Computer: POS
Description:
Windows saved user POS\OFFICE registry while an application or service was still using the registry during log off. The memory used by the user's registry has not been freed. The registry will be unloaded when it is no longer in use.
This is often caused by services running as a user account, try configuring the services to run in either the LocalService or NetworkService account.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at
Further, today after the OS reinstall, I had the following two errors in the event log:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7001
Date: 8/25/2009
Time: 4:33:52 PM
User: N/A
Computer: POS
Description:
The SQLSERVERAGENT service depends on the MSSQLSERVER service which failed to start because of the following error:
After starting, the service hung in a start-pending state.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7005
Date: 8/25/2009
Time: 4:43:06 PM
User: N/A
Computer: POS
Description:
The LoadUserProfile call failed with the following error:
The system has attempted to load or restore a file into the registry, but the specified file is not in a registry file format.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at
In any event, I checked out to make sure HKLM/system/currentcontrolset/mssql hive is there and it is.
Not sure where to go from here. I'm not familiar with the Retail Management System, however I had in-depth experience with the registry, and advanced windows troubleshooting.