In my previous post Fix STOP: 0x0000007B (OxF8968640, 0xC0000034, 0X00000000, 0x00000000), I described come remedies to that problem. The thing that started the whole thing was the following message.

I had Windows XP Home installed on my Dell Latitude E6500 laptop. I decided to upgrade it to Windows XP Professional. The upgrade completed without any problems. After laptop was rebooted, I had my nice login screen come up with all the user accounts listed. I clicked on my account and I got the above message. Since I have valid user license for Windows XP Professional, I clicked on "Yes" on the dialog box. Nothing happened. Usually a wizard starts that walks you through activation steps. I tried rebooting few times, booted in safe mode, repaired my installation. Nothing worked at all. I thought I could log into safe mode to do activation. Well, it told me that I can not activate copy of windows in safe mode. I tried to reboot with "Safe mode with Networking Support". That did not go very well because operating system refused to do so telling me that I have to activate copy of the windows before I could do so. After digging around and calling my preferential technical support at microsoft, I came to know the following things and fix for the problem.

• Windows Activation Wizard Depends on Installation of Internet Explorer. So much for not forcing users to have to install IE.
• Upgrade from Windows XP Home Basic to Windows XP Professional wiped my previous installation of IE8

So from above two issues you can see that I am in catch 22 situation and there was no way that activation wizard was going to come up. So here is the solution to the problem.

• Goto another machine that has CD/DVD burner
• Download full installer of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8)
• Burn IE8 on CD/DVD
• Now log in into "Safe Mode" on machine with activation problem
• Insert CD with IE8 installer
• Install IE8 on the machine
• Reboot the machine
• Now when This copy of Windows must be activated with Microsoft before you can log on. Do you want to activate Windows now? message dialog box pops up, click "Yes"
• This should bring up activation wizard and you should be able to complete your activation of copy of windows and use your machine normally.

Two days ago I decided to upgrade my Dell Latitude E6500 laptop from Windows XP Home Basic to Windows XP Professional. I decided not to do a clean install and use Upgrade option at install time. It upgraded fine. When I tried to log into the machine, i got the error message that I need to activate this version of Windows before I could use it. Well that is another story. I tried few things and decided to do a clean install. So I inserted my boot disk and made the laptop boot from it. All the drivers copied fine and when it went to step of Starting Windows Executive, BAM. I get the dreaded BSOD with error code STOP: 0x0000007B (OxF8968640, 0xC0000034, 0X00000000, 0x00000000). Well, this is a new laptop and was botting fine when I upgraded OS version. So it did not seem logical to think that hard disk is corrupted or some controller is failing. I remember that I had similar issue couple of years ago when I tried to upgrade OS on one of my Dell Precision Workstation. Then it hit me that at that time the problem was because of SATA drivers not being loaded from Windows XP install CD. And I had to ask Dell for installer CD that was used on that desktop. When you see this kind of error when you do any of the following:

• Reinstall OS from disk other than manufacturer
• Change your hard disk configuration
• You got SATA/RAID drives

First try to see if you can find your original OS disk that came with the machine or ask the manufacturer for a new one. There are different solutions proposed like disabling SATA option in BIOS. I do not feel comfortable with those options because it may introduce issues that may affect performance of your machine. I will strongly suggest using disk that has appropriate disk drivers.

This morning I opened the flap of my laptop and windows started resuming from hibernation. I noticed that all resources on the machine were getting consumed and eve after good 10 minutes the machine did not recover completely and CPU usage was still 100%. Instead of waiting any more I did a hard reboot of the laptop. After restart, I started getting all kind of weird error messages thrown at me. Errors that I have never seen before. The network service failed, event notification service failed, networking was not working and all kind of errors related to network. I thought my network slots on mother board has failed. So I decided to plug-in wireless broadband network modem to get connected. Well there was surprise I get error "Windows Sockets could not be initialized". Well that was kind of indication that something is seriously busted now. I did the usual routine of trying to run machine in safe mode. Well, i could not access event logs as well for any errors at that point because it complained about event log service not being started on the machine.

Since I was getting WinSock initialization error from my broadband card connectivity so I decided to reset WinSock stack on my machine. I ran the following command from command line.

netsh winsock reset

When the command started running first message I got in the console was saying nitialization function INITHELPERDLL in IPMONTR.DLL failed to start with error code 10107. That is very typical message you will see when winsock stack is corrupted. The command ran for few seconds and then I restarted the machine as it asked me to. That fixed the whole issue for me.

Once the machine started normally, I was able to look into System event log. Well, there was huge number of network related errors from last night. Some of the errors were:

• A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the Net.Tcp port Sharing Service service to connect.
• The network location awareness service terminated
• The IP helper service terminated
• The network link is down

How this information helps you if you are running into similar issues on your machine.

Few minutes ago I downloaded Silverlight 3 documentation as CHM file so I can read it while I am offline. After I unzipped the file, I launched it to view silverlight documentation. I could not view the help content. Instead I got the following error message in the details view.

Navigation to web page was cancelled

I knew what this error was because lot of my HTML Parser clients have run into this issue and I have given them the solution. But I never took time to post the solution on the site to settle it once and for all. This actually is not an error or there is nothing wrong with the file itself. You see this behavior because of one of security patches introduced in Windows XP. Because of a security hole, hackers were able to exploit CHM files to introduce malicious piece of code into user's machines. So now when you download a CHM file from internet, the operation system knows that it came from internet zone so it blocks opening of this file. Here are the steps you will need to follow to view any CHM file that you download from internet.

1. Right click on the file and bring up properties of the file. You will see the following message at the bottom of General Tab

   

2. Click on Unblock button. You will see that warning message become gray.
3. Click on Apply button and you are done.

You should be able to view the help file now.