Installing the new WB5.00b.002 beta doesn't work

Saturday, February 11, 2006 by kenlefeb | Discussion: WindowBlinds

I told Stardock Central to upgrade WindowBlinds, this evening, to the latest beta, and it told me I needed to reboot. Well, after rebooting, it told me to reboot again. And again... since the message mentions that my "registry protection software" might be causing the problem, I figured the only thing I might have that could do that is Microsoft Anti-Spyware, so I disabled that, and prevented it from starting on boot-up. WindowBlinds still keeps telling me to reboot.

I even went into the RunOnce key in the registry, to see what WB is trying to run to finish the installation, and saw that it's running WBCONFIG, so I tried running that manually, making sure nothing else was running. No dice: I was still told to reboot.

How can I go back to WB5.00b.001?

Also, it would be nice if you could somehow detect what is failing to properly install so you can tell me that, before you make me reboot, only to find it didn't work again.

Thanks for any tips or suggestions anyone can offer,

Ken
Bichur
Reply #1 Sunday, February 12, 2006 12:40 AM
How can I go back to WB5.00b.001?

Do you have SDC set to auto-archive?

If so then restore archive under 'file'
Neil Banfield
Reply #2 Sunday, February 12, 2006 5:19 AM

What is the size & date of wbsrv in your WindowBlinds directory.

kenlefeb
Reply #3 Sunday, February 12, 2006 9:11 AM
I did some more poking around, last night, and discovered the wb5.log file under SDCentral\Installed. This was actually more useful to me than the install.log under the WindowsBlinds folder. These lines clued me into the files I had trouble with:

Move: C:\WINDOWS\system32\Wbsys.dll 0 (Locked, replace on reboot) | 02/27/2003 02:27
Move: C:\Program Files\Stardock\Object Desktop\WindowBlinds\wbhelp.dll 0 (Locked, replace on reboot) | 09/18/2004 21:37

I figured it'd be as simple as killing whatever processes had a lock on these files, deleting them, and then restarting the machine.

Well, these must be used for hooks, or something, since way too many processes had these files locked. So, instead, I used msconfig to reboot with a diagnostic boot, and then wbconfig ran just fine through the RunOnce value.

I'm not running with a Normal startup again, and everything seems to be working just fine with the b.002 version of WindowBlinds.

Oh, Sir Bichur, no I wasn't running with auto-archive enabled, but i've got it turned on, now.

I hope that's helpful, enough, for you Neil. If you need any more information about my experience, I'd be happy to send you whatever log files might have the data you're interested in.

Thanks, again, for such an amazing product line, and thanks for the quick help you both offered.

Ken
BKx64
Reply #4 Thursday, February 23, 2006 9:03 PM

I had similar trouble.



Every time I ran WB's it told me I needed to reboot.



I finally had to set all the .exe's in the WB folder to run as administrator then it worked just fine.



Hope that helps someone.

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