XP Help and Support won't work

When I click on Start and then Windows XP "Help and Support" on my daughter's PC, she's a no work! Mine's ok. Anything other than reinstalling XP fix this?

Bo Bo Bolinski<<>>thanks folks!

 

first of all, before doing anything else, try and find another shortcut to help and support. it will be in the windows directory. also, what is the problem you are trying to fix?

 

DanTekGeek
Senior Member, thanks for the quick reply! Not really trying to fix any particular problem, just want the functioanilty of Help & Support, mainly downloading all the latest XP updates/upgrades/bug fixes/support pkgs, etc. I know I can go to the Microsoft page for that but that is a workaround and the Help & Suport function should be available. I'll ck the directory to see if I can find a shortcut, but, again, that is also a workaround for the built in functionality.

Thanks, BoBo

 

DanTekGeek, I found the shortcut>>>thanks! I put it on the desktop and it works fine. Wonder why it is disabled from the Start menu? Very strange. This is not the first time this has happened. I had the same problem on my machine a while back. This will work fine although being a PC guy it still bugs me that the built in function/shortcut is broken, know what I mean?

BoBo

 

you're gonna love this!! Since pasting the Windows shortcut for Help Center "?helpctr" now the Start one is working. Go figure!

Thanks dude!

 

whoops! my mistake..I am on my own PC, not my daughter's. So the H&S works here anyway...I set up the shortcut on her PC anyway..sorry bout that!.

 

yeah, and the start menu and task bar are triky things, with the tendacy to piss users off with the tinyest things. no matter how insignificat it may be, i get angry everytime i look at the trillian icon in the task bar and realise its a different one than it should be, heh

 

appreciate your advice on this!

BoBo Bolinski

 

Robo, that services.msc is pretty cool. Didn't know about that. Is it interactive? Can I reset things using it if my daughter's PC has Help and Support stopped, can I start it from there?

Thanks

 

Unfortunately, the shortcut would not work on my daughter's PC. Help & Support is still disabled. Next steps? Re-install XP Pro?

 

Try doing this on your daughters computer :

Regards,
Jade.

 

Jade/Jabman?Bowserman, thanks for the info. Actually, I found the Windows\PCHEALTH\HELPCTR\BINARIES folder on my PC and did all that and it works fine, although my Start>Help & Support works also. On my daughter's PC, however, the same bibaries\helpctr.exe file is dead, Won't open the support center clicking on it like it will for my PC and won't open from a desktop shortcut, Somehow the thing must have a bad registry value or something. I even created a CD copy of my entire PCHEALTH folder and contents from my PC and tried to use that on hers, Didn't think that would work and of course it didn't due to different addresses and other internals I am not conversant with. It will probably require an XP Pro upgrade or repair which I have done successfully before without losing all the good stuff on the hard drive,

Any other suggestions before I go that route?

Thanks for your help!

BoBo Bolinski (AKA BoBO the Lover of R. Crumb fame)

 

Halo, haven't tried SAFE Mode yet but will and thanks for the link!

Bo Bo Bolinski