Viewing Windows XP Archives

KB2481109 fails to install, With Error Message “Condition Check for Line 2 of PreRequisite returned FALSE

The fol­low­ing is an error our client received while installing updates. At our clients request, we started our diag­no­sis by first review­ing the error logs, which led use to the log file that was pro­duced by the mal­func­tion­ing pro­gram. The log was located at C:/Windows/KB2481109.log. After review­ing the log, and a bit of Gog­gling, we found that the error relates to “Remote Desk­top”. The log read as follows…

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
1.297: Hotfix started with following command line:
1.297: In Function GetReleaseSet, line 1240, RegQueryValueEx failed with error 0x2
1.390:  C:\WINDOWS\system32\mstscax.dll is Present
1.390: Condition succeeded for section Presence.RDCInstallBlock.Section in Line 1 of PreRequisite
1.390: FileVersion of C:\WINDOWS\system32\mstscax.dll is Less Than 6.0.6001.0
1.390: Fist Condition in Test.RDCInstallBlock.Section Failed
1.390: Condition Check for Line 2 of Prerequisite returned FALSE

Fur­ther research led us to Win­dows update, specif­i­cally the update “KB956744”. The quick­est fix for the issue, that we could see any­ways, was to go to “ADD/Remove pro­grams”, dis­play “Sys­tem Updates”, and sim­ply remove “KB956744”. In lieu of sys­tem warn­ings of “removal of said updates caus­ing dire con­se­quences”, we choose to unin­stall it. No the world didn’t end upon this pro­grams removal, in fact we were even able to con­tinue its install by down­load­ing the update directly via KB2481109 Direct Link” “Page Link”. It installed per­fectly, and our client was once again happy.

If this post­ing was help­ful, let us know. Have a great day folks, and happy computing.

Mystery Drive Q…

After a good deal of head scratch­ing, we were able to fix this issue. In one instance, this prob­lem was caused by the install of Office 2010, if this is what in fact led you to this arti­cle, you’re in for a good deal more head scratch­ing, to the point of a bleed­ing scalp. Another issue we encoun­tered with roots in our Office 2010 install, was that sub­se­quent attempts to install pro­grams, even unre­lated pro­grams, led failed installs. We were able to track this prob­lem to mul­ti­ple reg­istry keys hav­ing per­mis­sion errors. So in essence, this caused the reg­istry keys to become unchange­able in the eyes of the “Trusted Installer Ser­vice”. In one case it even led to the refor­mat­ting of an entire system.

OK, now for you’re sil­ver lin­ing. The good news is, we did suc­ceed in resolv­ing a few of these issues. But relis­ti­cally, if you have reg­istry key per­mis­sion errors, reg­istry dam­age has been done. In which case a sys­tem restore may be your only hope. Hav­ing said that, any com­ments related your efforts with a sim­i­lar repair would be greatly appre­ci­ated by all.

So lets get started. If in fact your issue is Office 2010 related, than the prob­lem most likely relates to “Appli­ca­tion Vir­tu­al­iza­tion” which is a com­po­nent of Office 2010. Specif­i­cally their tool to “Cre­ate a Portable Office 2010 Flash Drive”, which was used to cre­ate a portable 2010 usb drive on one of our machines.

In any case, our first sug­ges­tion would be to down­load and run Ccleaner. Run both the cache cleaner and the reg­istry cleaner in “Ccleaner”. Nor­mally we’re not big fans reg­istry clean­ers, but Cclean­ers pretty tame and very user friendly. And always remem­ber to set a restore point, as well as backup your registry.

Our first attempts at a repair were to delete the keys stored at

1
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup\MountedDevices

As well as var­i­ous other loca­tions. But attempt­ing to man­u­ally delete the related reg­istry keys only remove the drive tem­porar­ily. After a sys­tem restart, the dri­ves would reaper.

Next we installed “Appli­ca­tion Vir­tu­al­iza­tion”. The goal here was to try to over­write bad reg­istry keys, with ones from the installer. Once the pro­grams installed we sug­gest that you restart your machine. After restart­ing the com­puter, remove the pro­gram using “Pro­grams and Fea­tures”. Run Ccleaner again, reg­istry and cache, restart, and let us know if this fixed it.

If that doesn’t work, another method we used was installing Dae­mon Tools. Again with the hopes of over writ­ing bad reg­istry keys. We used DAEMON Tools Lite. There was a point in time when the use of this pro­gram was a hor­ri­ble idea, and was like com­puter sui­cide. But we’ll admit that their prod­uct has come a long way. The installer seemed to do a pretty fair job of clean­ing up after itself, leav­ing very few stray reg­istry keys, and pro­gram fold­ers behind.

If all else fails there’s always the Microsofts Office Removal Tools. This should unin­stall every trace of office from you’re sys­tem, and in most cases is a viable option. Sadly, in the case of the most dam­aged machine we ser­viced, the shear vol­ume of locked reg­istry keys forced us to rein­stall the OS.

After Thought

In our deal­ings with this issue, we came across a few com­put­ers with the same mys­tery drive. Inves­ti­gat­ing these issues fur­ther revealed recent installs of a disc util­i­ties. In one instance a recent failed removal of Ultra­ISO caused the issue. Nor­mally Ultra­ISO is a fan­tas­tic prod­uct, we our­selves use it on a reg­u­lar basis with no prob­lems what­so­ever. In more than one instance, this prob­lem could have been avoided by the user sim­ply uncheak­ing the option to install “UltraISO’s Drive Emu­la­tor”. But more often than not, users neglect to read through a prod­uct installers options. In fact, this is where users tend to install pro­grams labeled as “Adware”. In the case of one machine, a user left the option to install “UltraISO’s Drive Emu­la­tor”. Nor­mally this is a sim­ple thing to dis­able through UltraISO’s options menu, as well as some­thing that’s removed dur­ing an “Unin­stall”. Unfor­tu­nately our clients machine became infected with a virus, and dur­ing our clients efforts at a self-repair, Ultra­ISO became dam­aged to the point that reg­istry entries were orphaned.

So basi­cally, if your hav­ing this issue, review your pro­gram files to be sure some­thing sim­i­lar isn’t whats caus­ing your headaches. A few pro­grams we’ve seen cause sim­i­lar prob­lems are, Dae­mon Tools, Ultra­ISO, MagicDisk/MagicISO, Alco­hol 52%, Cir­cle Vir­tual, to name a few. In most instances the afore­men­tioned pro­grams are extremely safe, and very reli­able, and for the most part safe. But in rare instances, they have been known to cause sys­tem faults such as mys­tery dri­ves, and CD/DVD drive faults.

As always, good luck in you repair efforts. We hope this info was helpful.

Disable Microsoft Software Wavetable Synthesizer, My Music’s Cutting Out…

We recently encoun­tered a sys­tem that had an inter­mit­tent sound prob­lem. After run­ning for a few days, any music played would fade and recover repeat­edly. After research­ing the prob­lem, we started with a typ­i­cal round of updates to the usual sus­pects. Those being sound card dri­vers, codec’s, any media player soft­ware being uti­lized for play­back. At first this seemed to resolve the issue, but after just a few days, the prob­lem returned.

Not only was this a prob­lem with our media play­ers, but it was also effect­ing stream­ing online music. Our cur­rent favorite online music ser­vice is Last.Fm. After Pandora’s recent deci­sion to limit users free lis­ten­ing to 40 hrs a month.

So at this point we were able to elim­i­nate our browsers and media play­ers, as these were both up to date. The next thing to rule out was our hard­ware. This was sim­ple enough as the hard­ware is a home the­ater sys­tem that’s uti­lized by other devices, all of which never have an issue. By process of elim­i­na­tion were left with dri­vers and media enhance­ment software’s.

As it turns out there’s an enhance­ment loaded by win­dows, our ver­sion being “Win­dows Vista Ulti­mate 64 Bit”. That par­tic­u­lar enhance­ment goes by the name of “Microsoft Soft­ware Wavetable Syn­the­sizer”. When open­ing your sound prop­er­ties from the con­trol panel, you’ll typ­i­cally see 3 tabs across the top of the win­dow. These are, Play­back, Record­ing, and Sounds. You’ll more than likely be on the Sounds tab by default. If win­dows sounds drive you nuts, as they do us, this is a good oppor­tu­nity to dis­able them. Sim­ply choose “No Sounds” from the drop down on the sounds tab. In Vista you also have the option to load the startup sound separately.

Now select the “Play­back” tab, and dou­ble click the upper device, usu­ally called “Speak­ers”. If you’re not sure which device is your default play­back device, play some music and look for the device with active lev­els. Dou­ble click that device and nav­i­gate to the “Advanced” tab. If selected, uns­e­lect both boxes under “Exclu­sive Mode”. Don’t be tempted to increase your sam­ple rate on this tab. Typ­i­cally the defaults are opti­mal, and increas­ing them could lead to an exag­ger­a­tion of what we’re here to fix.

Keep in mind sys­tems will vary in these areas depend­ing on dri­vers, sys­tem setup, and so forth. So you’re set­tings may look slightly dif­fer­ent. Next choose the “Enhance­ments” tab. Dis­able every­thing on this tab, if possible.

Now restart you com­puter, and the issue should be resolved. We men­tion ear­lier in the arti­cle that as part of our diag­no­sis, we updat­ing sys­tem dri­vers and codec’s. In the long run, reg­u­lar updates will lead to a much more pos­i­tive com­put­ing expe­ri­ence, and will dras­ti­cally reduce the num­ber of errors you encounter. Let us know if this was help­ful by leav­ing a reply below. Happy com­put­ing. :-)

We’ve Added A Live Support Function…

glossy-ball-smiley
If you look to your right, you may have noticed a live chat but­ton. If we’re online and avail­able to chat, feel free to try it out. We strive to pro­vide our clients with the high­est level of IT sup­port and ser­vice. When it comes to inno­v­a­tive design, lead­ing edge cus­tomer sup­port, and guar­an­teed sat­is­fac­tion, the Gurus are the lead­ers of the pack.

Do you have a web­site your inter­ested in devel­op­ing? If so, let us give you free quote. We’ll uti­lize the lat­est tools and appli­ca­tions to make your dream site a real­ity. Thanks for read­ing our post. Feel free to leave a comment.

I Don’t Have Outlook, Is There a Similar Product I can Download?

TbirdLogo

The short answer is, Yes.

Listed below you’ll find a vari­ety of free Email clients avail­able for down­load. But be aware, not all mail providers allow you to use a mail client such as Out­look. Both Yahoo and Hot­mail require their users to upgrade to a paid ser­vice in order to access their Email via a mail client. How­ever, if you’re ISP pro­vid­eds you with an Email account, ie. pacbell.net, sbcglobal.net, att.com, comcast.net, etc., You’ll more than likely be able to access your Email using a mail client.

(more…)

What’s a good Anti-Virus to use?

We wrote this post in response to a com­ment on another post. We most often rec­om­mend Avast, AVG, and Zone Alarm. Our choices are based on prod­ucts that are effi­cient in pre­vent­ing virus infec­tions, semi trans­par­ent, unob­tru­sive, and user friendly. And FYI. if you see the image below when copy­ing files, you may have a virus. :-)

Virus

Avast free and Avast Pro:

Avast pro­vides a free Anti-Virus, how­ever we found it to be a lit­tle intru­sive and irri­tat­ing. Avast seems to pester its free users with con­stant pops and related to their paid product.

Their paid prod­uct how­ever is a dream to use. The only time Avast Pro will ever pester you or slow your flow of work and surf­ing, is if you encounter a mali­cious script from a web­page, down­load mali­cious soft­ware, a viruses, or any other prob­lem you may have.

(more…)

UAA HD Audio Driver Missing, Can’t Update

This issues can be caused by an acci­den­tal unin­stall of the HD Audio dri­vers, or a bad install of the HD Audio dri­vers. Our fix is as follows.

(more…)

Netgear MRVGINA.dll, disables fast user switching XP

We came across this issue after installing a Net­gear wire­less card in a desk­top run­ning Microsoft XP. The fix was quite sim­ple. Start by open­ing regedit, Start-Run-Type regedit. Nav­i­gate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows NT/Current Version/WINLOGON And delete the key named GINAdll

Its as sim­ple as that. Restart the com­puter and your good to go.

Virus Infection “Unable to change desktop background image”

We recently repaired a heav­ily infected com­puter. After clean-up we were unable to change the desk­top back­ground image. Even after clean-up the names of the back­ground images were all grayed out. After a bit of research we came across sev­eral reg­istry keys which were added by a virus.

The first thing we did was to, uncheck “lock web con­tent” in “dis­play properties”.

Then we deleted the fol­low­ing reg­istry keys.…

Click “Start” hit run (can’t see run?), type ” Regedit ” (with­out the quotes) and nav­i­gate to the fol­low­ing entries, and delete them.
(more…)

Error Message: “Task Manager has been disabled by your administrator”

Viruses are always try­ing to cover their tracks. This repair was no excep­tion.… Error Mes­sage: “Task Man­ager has been dis­abled by your admin­is­tra­tor”. There was no way any­one using this com­puter would even be capa­ble of secur­ing “Task Man­ager”. After a bit of research I came across two things, the first was that “Spy­bot” picked up this prob­lem. The sec­ond was that, “Spy­bot” could only half-repair the prob­lem. After a restart I found that either typing

REG add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v Dis­able­TaskMgr /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

into the “run com­mand”

Or go to “Run” and type “Regedit” and nav­i­gate to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Soft­ware \ Microsoft \ Win­dows \ Cur­rentVer­sion \ Poli­cies\ System

and delete “DisableTaskMgr”

cleared the prob­lem right up.

Once again, if you have any prob­lems, please Con­tact Us.

I Can’t See The Run Command

If you can’t see the run com­mand under the start option try.…

Right click­ing” the “Task Bar”, choose “Prop­er­ties”, click the “Start Menu” tab, click the “Cus­tomize” but­ton, click the “Advanced Tab”, then scroll down to “Run com­mand” and check the box. If its checked, un-check it, apply, and re-check it. If this doesn’t help, tell me, and I’ll help you resolve the issue. Thanks for help­ing the knowl­edge base :)