Gone haywire....

Not sure what happened, but I have lost pictures, Word Files, Outlook won't open, and most programs won't open.

When I go to open Outlook, I get this error message:

Outlook.EXE - Unable to locate DLL
The dynamic link library OUTLLIB.dll could not be found in the specified path
D:\Office;.;C:\WINNT\system32;C:\WINNT\system;C:\WINNT;D:\Office\;C:WINNT\system32;C:\WINNT;C:\WINNT\System32\Wbem

When I go to open Ad-Aware I get missing shortcut, both from the desktop, and from the Start menu.

Same thing with AVG, RegCleaner, Spybot, etc.

When I go to open Word, it prepares to install....

When I go to folders in my D drive, the folders exist, but are empty. I have a few random pictures left, out of hundreds, possibly even thousands.

When I restart it tells me Ad-Watch had an error opening the reference file. When I go to stat Adwatch manually, it gives me the same error.

All the IE links I have on my desktop work fine. I'm able to connect to the internet no problem, and even come here, which is a relief. Also, Outlook Express seems to work just fine as well, so I can use that for email.

I re-downloaded AVG and ran it. No virus as far as it knows. I don't think this is a spyware issure.

I'm afraid the DLL files got corrupted somehow, not sure if there is a fix.

Can I run a repair on Windows 2000 Professional without re-installing? Of course, if all my documents and pictures are gone already, it hardly matters.....

The only things I did yesterday was install Spybot, but afte running it, things ran fine for about 6 hours, until around midnight.....I also installed Mozilla Firefox for about 5 minutes and decided I didn't like it, and un-installed it. At that point I noticed AI RoboForm was not filling forms, and the data was empty. That's when I discovered there was LOTS of data missing.....

Any ideas what's going on? I"m at a loss, and very sad.....

I'm running Windows 2000 Professional
40 gig hard drive
512 DDR
AMD XP 2200

Eric

 

you can run the repair on office and it should fix the office issues, BUT I would try the PC inspector program from the files section and see if it can find what's left of your files BEFORE you do this. The sooner you do it, the better the chances of recovering files.

 

Just Spybot and Mozilla....I actually am more suspect of Mozilla than I am Spybot. I've had Spybot before, and as I said, I ran it and everything was fine for hours. It was after installing and uninstalling Mozilla that I started having problems.....

 

Just tried File Recovery, and there was nothing to recover. It went through the whole thing, but nothing was recovered. Any other ideas?

At least all our email addresses somehow survived on Outlook Express. We had both Outlook and Express installed. Eric was going to delete Express, but hadn't gotten around to it, so at least we have that.

As far as the pictures go, this WAS the back-up. This is on Eric's work computer. We had sent ours in for some repairs (still under warantee). We haven't put anything onto disc since before Christmas, so we lost both kids' birthdays and Christmas. This is the second year in a row that we lost Kolya's birthday pics. The kid is going to think we didn't celebrate her 3rd or 4th birthday

 

Missing DLL's

Cindy, Can't help you with your current problem but www.roamerzone.com/ will enable you to back up all DLL's to another place, in future, as a safety thing.

Also, when you get a missing DLL message, open up RZDLL Backup (leave the error message open) and fill in the path name from the missing DLL error message and the name of the missing DLL and, by magic, RZDLL Backup will restore the missing DLL.

Baz
======================

 

Well, anybody got any more ideas on how to recover those files and why the heck this happened? Was Mozzila the cause? I can hardly believe that it was the culprit by itself.....

 

Hi Yellow Shorts, sorry to hear about your disaster I googled around and found this mozilla page. I'm not savvy enough to know if it might give you any answers, but it kind of sounds like you may have encountered an issue with mozilla as described here. Like I said I'm not bright enough to know, but maybe you should take a look at it.

 

Well, as I can't understand most of what is being said on that page, I sure as heck ain't bright enough!!

Anyway, looks like we lost quite a bit of Data....Seems we just can't win lately.

 

I didn't see anything useful there, but the fact that you unintalled Mozilla JUST before discovering lots of other stuff was missing makes me suspect Mozilla. I can see it uninstalling shared files instead of leaving them intact, but I don't understand why it would have wiped unrelated data files. But I wouldn't re-install it.

 

This almost sounds like what I just got today, the newlove virus. Here's a link. Check it out.
http://www.csus.edu/uccs/alerts/archived/newlove.htm

P.S. AntiVir found it for me.

 

Yes, I'm definately suspect of Mozilla, and No, I sure ain't re-installing it!!

My IE browser does just fine! And I'm through with Outlook, too. It may have nothing to do with this problem, but I'm just sick of it's bugginess and sluggishness.

I uninstalled all the programs that were not opening, un-installed Microsoft Office, and re-installed everything, excluding Outlook, Access, Powerpoint, etc, but including Word and Excel. Now we're using Outlook Express, which I love, and I just discovered Irfanview last night, which seems to be a great little Photo editor for our capabilities.....Our machine is running great, and though we lost quite a bit of data, we did have a majority backed up on CD....I hate that I lost some of my writing, but what can ya do?

Thanks everyone for your help!

Eric

 

Did you try running scandisk?

 

Where can I get scan disk?

 

In "my computer", right click on the C: drive. Click properties, then tools then error checking. A reboot will start it.

 

I was just about to tell ya I had figured it out!! Good ole Google....between that and this forum, I will get the answer one way or another!!

Thanks guys.

Eric