help me help my dad PLEASE [gateway; home essentials; win98SE]

[bleepster]

 
They say that older people shouldn’t drive - the same goes for computers.

Anyway - after spending 3 hours on his p.c. - I have it running about 70% better. He had lots of problems.

I have 2 things yet to fix. IE6.0 will get errors and shut down 95% of the time. No big deal - I’ll just uninstall it and reinstall it and see if that fixes it.

However, NONE of his program files have the option to uninstall. And when I go into Control Panel, Add/Remove it says, "access denied, the specified file cannot be accessed"

This goes for ANY icon in control panel. I have no clue as to how to fix it.

Sounds like someone set up Administration rights, but I aint sure. We are not prompted for a log in or password on boot up.

He has WIN98SE.

Can you PLEASE HELP ME. All I want for now is access to the features in Control Panel

[Insomniac]

Greetings road runner,

Most people do this by editing the control.ini file in C:/Windows.

Look and see what is in there. Normally, no mention of any control panel apps should be listed.

If someone has altered it, it will say something like applet.cpl=no (EG).

If it doesn't have any applets listed, then something else has been done.

See if there is an applet called tweakui in there.

[bleepster]

i heard of tweakui - will that do a full uninstall of programs?

[Insomniac]

Can you see tweakui in control panel as an applet?

[bleepster]

i am not on that p.c. at the moment

I downloaded it from MS.com - i will install it when i get home from work.

someone told me it sounds like someone killed a .pnl or a .ocx file by accident

whats that mean????

i should add - he did have a virus - it was called something like "downloader" or something

this virus program found it and cleared it "AVG-Anti Virus"

[Windows98]

IF it still has problems Reformat the whole system! or not