Windows 7 System Restore on Windows 7 goes very bad

[Scott Stevenson]

Earlier today, I tried to uninstall Office 2007 Trial (which had expired) from my Gateway PC. I have already installed Office 2010 Trial, so both programs are on the PC right now. I could not get the program to uninstall in the Control Panel, so I decided to leave the Office 2007 program on the PC until I could remove 2010, having concerns about a conflict. I decided to restore the PC to June 25th (a recommended restore point). After the restore, the monitor defaulted to the Gateway home screen, most of my factory installed programs had disappeared from the programs window and almost all of my desktop icons were gone. I now have a "GfxUI is not working" error window and I receive the "windows cannot access the specified path..." message whenever I try and open files. The files are only findable by entering file names. They don't show up in the Documents setting. Also, I have no Internet Explorer. A startup message tells me I am only logged on temporarily, even though I am the system administrator. The only odd thing about the system restore was a prompt to empty the Recycle Bin with a message that some files were corrupted. I'm dead in the water. I have 64 bit Windows 7. I thought about using Device Manager to uninstall the Intel graphics driver, but was worried that I could not re-install without access to the Intel site. Help, please!

 

[Trouble]

Scott:
Hello and welcome to the forums. The first thing I would suggest at this point, if you have not done so already, is to back up all critical data to an external source (USB drive, CD or DVD) pictures, music, docs, spreadsheets, email, etc. You may also want to create another account with administrative privledges or enable the built in administrators account for temporary use just in case your local profile has been or is becoming corrupt.
If you performed the System Restore from within Windows, then you should be able to undo it by typing system restore into the search box, selecting it from the results, and choosing "Undo my last restoration".
You may also want to try the built in system file checker utility and see if that produces any help or at least some information regarding your issue. Start->All Programs->Accessories->right click Command prompt and choose run as administrator, then type sfc /scannow, let it run and see if it helps.

 

[Scott Stevenson]

I don't know why you call yourself Trouble, because your solution to my problem was trouble free. I followed your advice and unrestored (3 times due to 3 sytem restore attempts), and I am full operational again. I have a WD external hard drive and will make a point to do an immediate back up , but I still don't understand why this happened in the first place. As far as I can tell, it is all related to my attempt to uninstall Office 2007 while 2010 is also an active program. Any thoughts on this would be most appreciated, but either way, thanks VERY MUCH for the excellent suggestion.

By the way, Gateway could not have been less helpful during this. All they wanted to do was sell me $129.00 worth of tech support, for a 96 day old computer. Trouble, you're great, but Gateway, you suck.

Scott

 

[Trouble]

Glad to hear that we both got lucky and you were able to dodge the bullet. I wish I could even guess why your issue may have occurred, but unfortunately I haven't a clue, sorry.
Creating a restore point manually, before any big project, like a major software install or removal can often be a life saver, and all too often, all of us, myself included forget or just choose not to do it, backups also....until it's too late.
Anyhow, thanks for the kind words and very glad that you were able to resolve your problem. Appreciate you joining the Windows 7 Forums and hope you continue to hang around, watch, learn and help others by sharing your experiences.

 

[Scott Stevenson]

Thanks again, Trouble. I'm sure glad you were available to troubleshoot. I'll check back at this forum to offer what help I can. It sure saved me $129.00 that Gateway didn't deserve. Have a great day!

Scott

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

One more plug for making a complete system backup to an external hard drive, just in case!
I'm so paranoid that I have two complete system backups, one created with Windows 7 back up and one created with Norton Ghost on two different external hard drives.
I have a boot DVD for each of them.

you can't be too safe.

Mike