Sorry, kitn, I have been slam busy with school and one of my HDs died a slow horrible death on me.

The upshot is that I am back online with a fresh install of Vista.

I did look through your CBS log but there is a repetition of items dealing with your optical (read: CD/ DVD) drive that I cannot understand at all - and I mean a *whole* lot - to the tune of several hundred entries within the same second....

re: your appsmgmt missing - that is just plain weird - either something moved it, or else something renamed it, or else something completely deleted it - and none of those three scenarios are good.

When you downloaded one, did you verify the version? If you downloaded a .DLL written for XP and you are on Vista, you may very well get that error message that you received.

Hey there, glad you're back, I've been kinda stressing. Okay, so let me explain how I discovered the appmgmt thing ... I was browsing through WinPatrol when trying to find a reason why my programs were no longer working, and noticed it listed under services. The odd thing was, Scotty acknowledged it, but also said it couldn't find the file. I googled it and saw that it should be under system32, but of course it was not, nor anywhere. And then i thought, maybe this is the key. Maybe when I uninstalled my ESET firewall, it took that with it which then took out all my existing antivirus, spyware and reg cleaner programs.

Well, so I downloaded it from dlldump, version 5.1.2600 and verified with Windows. Well then it gave me the error message when I tried to register it gave me this error "... DllRegisterServer entry point was not
found. This file can not be registered." Googled it and seems to be somewhat common, my only question is maybe is there a difference in the dll version for different OS, like do I need a Vista one? If so, I looked and looked and couldn't find one that said it was specifically for Vista.

Also, why didn't the scannow pick up on the missing dll? It seems to be an important one. And also, even though it is missing and apparently has been for some time, I was still able to download and install new programs.

As for the optical activity? Could it be from the dreaded Vista "shadow copy" service? I noticed in task manager that there were a LOT of read writes going on, which is what I assumed was the shadow copy running in the background. I thought I disabled it but apparently it's resilient.

Again, many apologies - that HD that died took my motherboard with it, it seems.

back with a new system that is all of 7 days old. Hopefully I am in a much more stable position.

As for the version, yes, the 5.1.2600 is the Windows XP version, and will not work with Vista. I could send you the file, but I have already upgraded to SP1, and if you have not, then there is a good chance that our versions will be different as well.

post back and let me know if you are on SP1 or not.

Hey there, sorry to hear about your HD ... I like your description, "a slow and horrible death". So you decided to stick with Vista, I guess that means you like it. I'm undecided as of now, but I've recently done some tweaks to the registry to decrease the QOS reserved bandwidth and to increase the amount of items that can be downloaded at once (found some websites) and now my internet speed seems much better.

Yes, I also have the sp1 update, so would it possible for you to send me the appmgmts.dll file? I looked everywhere for the 6.0 version (which I assume is for Vista) but with no luck

And it's cool that you get to me whenever you can ... I understand what it's like to have both work and school. I'm just glad you're willing to help me. In regards to my question from the last post, do you think the "Vista Shadow Copy" is causing all the optical activity? Do you have yours enabled or did you take it out? I've been searching for good websites so I can begin the long process of weeding out all the HP bloatware and unnecessary Vista services etc. If I end up having to reformat and reinstall, I think I wanna do the "clean install" I keep reading about.

I never disable VSC because it may come in handy one day, but it should have nothing to do with *optical* activity....I emphasize should....

I'll see about getting that file to ya in a bit.

Now, be advised that I am currently running a 64 bit version of Vista, and I found 4 different locations of the appmgmts.dll file on my system, three of which were the same size and one of which was a completely different size - so I am assuming that this is the correct one (since it comes from the System32 directory, and matches the size of the one in the WOW64 directory) but it may not work - you'll jsut have to try to register it and see....

Worst case scenario, you'll get an error saying it cannot register....

appmgmts.zip
Description:	appmgmts.dll, ver 6.0.6001.18000, Jan 20, 2008, 148992 Byts in size.	Download
Filename:	appmgmts.zip
Filesize:	78.99 KB
Downloaded:	17 Time(s)

Ugghh I thought that might work. Wouldn't register ... I wonder if I'm typing in the right command (regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\appmgmts.dll). I've also tried variations on this with the "...u appmgmts.dll" and "...r appmgmts.dll". Same ol same ol ... server can't be found, entrypoints, etc. And what is this about "exporting", do I need to do that? I even did a search in the registry for appmgmts and there weren't any other instances, except for under winpatrol services found. So, I thought the whole point of this dll was to deal with application installations etc, so how am I able to download and install new programs still? It must be present somewhere I haven't thought of. Any ideas, or maybe I should just give up on this, my computer does still "work".

Oh yeah, do you know much about fairuse4wm? I was looking into it but so far have only read stuff about how it won't work in Vista sp1.

I don't know anything about fairuse4wm, but I suspect it is a method by which people can remove the DRM protection embedded into Windows Media Files (both audio and Video).

If that one did not do it then I need to know specifically what exact version of Vista you're running - I wonder if you have a 64 bit as well and that is why it is not allowing you to register the file, because you are in actuality missing the 64 bit .DLL instead of the 32 bit .DLL....

I wish it was that ... unfortunately I have the 32 bit and it just wont work. Could it be that the appmgmts.dll is not self-registerable? Was that the right command I was typing? Maybe it doesn't have to be registered at all. One more thing I might mention that i assumed was a glitch, but now i'm beginning to wonder, is how WinPatrol reads the file. It reads it in the system32 folder, which is where it is, but it also read it there when it wasn't, which is how I first noticed a possible problem/missing dll. Also, under the "startup" column in "services", it says "0utomatic". I can't change the startup to "automatic" or "manual" or anything. Also, it's not listed under services in admin tools. I might try to reinstall winpatrol tonight.

I really should have looked before just providing it to you - you r correct in surmising that it is not a registerable .DLL - in fact, it

That seems very familiar ... I believe that during my initial research as to why my particular programs were no longer working, I found that it might have something to do with my group policy settings. I think maybe it is related to DEP or code integrity, which is what I thought and kinda still think is the cause of my problem. Unfortunately I could never figure out how to get to gpedit (gpedit command prompt didn't work) to see if there was a setting I needed to change or just generally look around.

As for where appmgmts went and how, that's quite an enigma. The only thing I can think of is that it might of gotten deleted when i uninstalled ESET (maybe its security policy was involving or using it somehow). Other than that, it's a complete mystery. Sorry if I'm not using the right terminology or making sense, I'm not all that computer literate, and I've been doing so much research on so many different possibilities that I think my brain is burnt out.

So, that's leaves the question of how to replace the file and is it really needed, or is it already working since it doesn't need to be registered?

What you say makes perfect sense - except that uninstalling a program should not delete a normal Windows component. Emphasis on should not.

If you copied the file back to the location it is missing from (usually C:\Windows\System32\) then it will work - when you next run gpedit.

BTW, did we (read: I) ever establish exactly which version of Vista you are running? If you are running Home Basic (and possibly other versions, I'll research) then you may not have the Group Policy tool to use in the first place....

If uninstalling ESET did somehow delete the appmgmts, then that would fit kinda in that that is when my issue started. I'm not too sure on what all appmgmts does, other than install stuff, so the only part that doesn't make sense is why the programs i already had installed "stopped working". I know you said that "it shouldn't", but maybe it was being shared by some of those programs, is that possible? I did also go into regedit and deleted all the Eset keys (I suspected the ESET wasn't the real program) which now that i think about it probably shouldn't have.

The version I have is Vista Home Premium 32 bit. Thanks again for all your help

So I guess that means that I don't need it after all ... kinda weird though that "Scotty" detected it, I know I didn't install it (atleast prior to these recent attempts). That also means that that is probably not what is causing my problem(s), which puts me back at the beginning again

All this tends to lead me to the idea that I must've deleted a "common/shared" registry key or something. Something definetly happened when i uninstalled ESET. The other thing was that after I uninstalled it I tried to install SpySweeper several times ... several because it would not work, so I kept installing and uninstalling and restarting, probably more than I should have. I know, I felt guilty as I was doing it [/b]