I was online yesterday morning - that would be Wednesday morning. I'm losing track of what day today is because of what's happened in the last eighteen hours or so...but I'm getting ahead of myself. I was online, and something was running an update. I realized I must've somehow switched something to automatically update when my friend had set this computer up to only update manually. Anyway, I let the update finish, and then shut down.
An hour or so later, I started up again. Something seemed different - Windows XP gave a generic "welcome" screen instead of one that specifically listed my profile. It opened up Windows, displayed my wallpaper, displayed my cursor, and...that was it. No icons, no nothin'. After a minute or so a box came up that said this:
Windows Explorer Error
And either in the box, or after attempting to clear the box, I got this message:
The instruction at 0x00000000 referenced memory at 0x00000000. The memory could not be "read".
(I especially like the scare quotes around the word "read.")
Long, long story short, my computer was broken. All my stuff was still there, I just couldn't get it to work right. After a bunch of ham-handed attempts to resolve the issue and a frantic (from my end of the phone) attempt by my friend to be remote tech support, we decided I should take the new computer back down to his place for him to look it over and, if necessary, reinstall the operating system. (I was, however, able to get it to print out six copies of the latest version of my résumé before I disconnected.)
Gratifyingly, once he got a look at the error message in person my friend was as baffled by the problem as I was. After a few attempted fixes he decided that the best course of action was to reformat the hard drive and reinstall the operating system and any stuff I had added in the last three days. And it would have worked, too, if it weren't for the massive electrical storm that knocked out power here until about 2:00 in the morning. We decided it would be best if I stayed here overnight, since the storm might easily have knocked down trees that would make extra-dangerous roadblocks at night.
(As I slept I had a bizarre dream about my grandfather having written a fairy tale immediately before his death. The truth of the story was somehow encapsulated in my brain, and was unlocked by one of my friends' cats sucking it out of my ear as I slept. I need to ask them if their cats are actually in the habit of chewing on your ears as you sleep - that would at least explain that aspect of the dream.)
As soon as the power came back on, my friend came down here and completed the reinstallation. Then we loaded Windows Live Messenger, one of the few things I had added since I got the PC home. Fine. We rebooted. Fine.
Then we installed the latest version of Firefox. And Google Earth, too. We rebooted.
Back to the error message and an iconless screen.
He did a quick restore and we uninstalled Firefox. So far, so good. I think we have rebooted since then, but I can't be sure - I'm still half-asleep.
I did some research into this and neither one of these problems seems rare, though neither one seems to have a single cause pinned down, either. And I don't know if the latest version of Firefox - which has been optimized for Windows Vista - is now producing conflicts with older versions of Windows. Anybody have any ideas?
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