Thank You Microsoft

Expecting that a tech would be calling this morning I decided to pop in and old 100gb drive and do a fresh install of Windows. I downloaded the very latest drivers for all my hardware and burned them to CD to get ready. I figured that I would keep on installing my software and test between each install until I figured out what made it break MSN Video and cause IE to crash.

When MS called I was working on the new install but I popped in the old drive real quick and we went to work on that. By this time I had already verified that it was capable of working on a fresh install.

He basically went through everything remotely that I had already tried myself except one thing. He re-installed IE which is a trick to do...one I forgot to try and there are no actual repair tools for it In WinXP.

When he got done it wasn't crashing but I had no audio. He said he would call me back in about 15 min.

While I was waiting I decided to remove some of the fixes I had used previously to get it even marginally working. I was trying to get rid of stuff that wasn't needed according to my working fresh install. After going through a few hoops of installing the things it didn't need and immediatly removeing them...the audio started working and it wasn't crashing anymore. It was a bad bunch of codecs that appears to be the culprit.

If the darn thing had worked when I first installed it then I might not have had to go through all this BS.

Anyway my experience with both MS techs were good.

 

 

 

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