All the trouble on my 64-bit Windows 7 machine began right after I installed Microsoft's EMET patch and then uninstalled it a day later because it slowed the computer down to a crawl.... (but strangely, EMET on the XP virtual machine doesn't seem to impact it at all.....)
The first problem I noticed (a week or so ago) was IE9 was now working very erratically - sometimes it would connect to old IE Favorites OK and other times it would just sit there spinning its wheels. But then I found that System Restore was completely dead, which I mistakenly thought was a side effect of my next discovery; ALL my Restore points had been wiped out!! There was nothing listed there at all! - and I wasn't allowed to create any new ones.... But I did notice that my playing around with System Restore resulted in 24 copies of rstrui.exe all running simultaneously.
I did a Microsoft Windows Repair at bootup, and that allowed me to create some new Restore Points, at least. And resetting IE9 to its default settings appeared to make it connect to a variety of sites more reliably (or did I imagine that?) - but still not as smoothly as it used to.
Then today: FreeFileSynch hung up completely while I was copying from one drive to another; it simply stopped. I discovered that I couldn't shut down the hung-up FreeFileSynch by using the Task Manager, but Process Explorer was able to shut it down (after a delay).
Then I discovered that now I could list a few recent Restore Points (although some less recent ones had disappeared - again) and I could still create new Restore Points (so I increased the disk space allocated to saving Restore Points, in case that was playing a part in all this). But System Restore still refused to run (nothing would appear to happen when I clicked on it) - and then I found (using the Task Manager) that yet again I had multiple instances of rstrui.exe running simultaneously (8 or 9). So I closed all those down (using Process Explorer again) and rebooted and then ran Tweaking.com - Windows Repair (All in One) (v 1.9.18) for the very first time.
It ran MalwareBytes (which I aborted before it finished, because it was finding nothing, and I do frequent virus checks anyway); then CHKDSK (which reported some (unspecified!) errors - or was that just the persistent bad sector?); and then Microsoft's System File Checker which found numerous errors, including some (unspecified!) files that it said it could not fix....?
Then Tweaking.com - Windows Repair tried to repair the computer and I ran the beta System Restore Repair at the end, and rebooted.
Success! Now some long-gone Restore Points have reappeared! And now System Restore offers to apply them:
And somehow Tweaking.com - Windows Repair restored the two long-gone System Image restore points at the bottom of the list!
Questions:
Does Windows Defender inhibit Tweaking.com - Windows Repair? Because I forgot to disable it, and of all the logs in C:\Program Files (x86)\Tweaking.com\Windows Repair (All in One), only two (windows_repair_hkey_local_machine_3_log.txt and windows_repair_hkey_local_machine_4_log.txt) seem to contain any information about what Tweaking.com - Windows Repair actually achieved. There were several warnings about "registry key is skipped (contains wildcard)" and "C:\System Volume Information\{long string1}{long string2} - CreateFile Error : 5 Access is denied" but almost the all the log files are completely empty, and the remainder don't say what Tweaking.com - Windows Repair actually succeeded in doing.
But something must worked in all of that, because System Restore now appears to be operational again!!!
And Question 2:
I finally pinned down the new (deviant) behavior of IE9 while I was fiddling with all this: it won't connect to any https site (such as
https://www.google.com/) if I'm in any tab other than the very first one that IE9 opens up... Does anyone know how to fix this annoyance?
ToM
