Yesterday, someone I used to work with call me and ask for help with his computer. It was doing something I had never heard of before. He would trying logging on, but it would log him off immediately. He isn’t very good with fixing computers and I’m pretty much his designated tech support. Also, this computer used to be mine (mine, mine). I sold it to him a year and a half ago, so I still have some attachment to it.
I went over to his house to see if I can fix it. I tried to boot into safemode, but it would still log out immediately! I was perplexed, how can I solve this if I can’t access Windows desktop. Since internet access was impossible, I asked him to retrace his activity on the computer during that day. He mention that Internet Explorer was causing him a lot of problems lately. It would pop up for no reason, like when he wasn’t using it. So he ran the AVG Anti Virus software. It got done scanning and it asked him to restart it, which he did. Then the fun started…
I took the computer home to work on it. I read up online to hear other people’s experience with this problem. There was one thing that stuck out to me, it was mentioned a lot. Apparently, people had an executable file call “userinit.exe” erased from their “C:\WINDOWS\system32″ after anti virus scanning. I took out the hard drive, attached it to an external kit and then connected to my computer. I was able to browse his hard drive content and check to see if he was missing userinit.exe. Sure enough, it wasn’t there. I went to my “C:\WINDOWS\system32″ folder and copy it over to his matching folder. I wasn’t 100% sure about it, but it made sense to me. I assume “userinit”, meant “user initiation” to start Windows.
I reconnected the hard drive back to it’s own computer and TADA! It work! That was easy enough. I checked what was installed on his computer and ran SpyBot and AVG Anti Virus again to get rid of adware and viruses. He had a whole bunch! I took the computer home at midnight and got done scanning and double checking at 11am. I’m a night owl, but this kept me up past my normal sleeping hours. Of course, I wasn’t glued to that computer most of the time. I just had an urge to fix my old computer right.
Hopefully my experience can help someone fix their computer if they are having this problem as well.
It’s now 12pm and I’m getting sleepy… zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Update…
Something I forgot to mention. I wasn’t able to boot from the Windows XP disc because the guy didn’t remember his administrative password.
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