Hello,

I’ve got a real problem with my Windows ME computer. The other day I went to the Microsoft Updates website to check for updates. The site said I should download a certain “critical update” - I forget its name, but I think it was a patch for Explorer. Its size was about 3 MB.

After the download, a window said that I needed to restart my computer, so I hit the restart button on this window. Now my computer won’t work!

After the restart, I get the Windows ME screen, the hourglass, then the blue sky and clouds of my desktop picture. But there are no folders, no taskbar, no words, no nothing! When I hit Ctrl – Alt – Delete, a gray window comes up, but it’s empty (there used to be words in it).

I’ve let the machine sit while on for hours, hoping that something would happen, but no change. I’ve also used a rescue disk (and also the F8 button) to start in safe mode, but all I get is the safe mode screen. Again, no folders, nothing else. The help file mentions a scanreg command, but all I get with that is a bad command message.

I’ve also gotten to the A prompt and the C prompt (not bad for a non-techie), and I’ve run scandisk /all /surface. The scan completes and says that there are no errors.

A friend says to use the e-machine Restore Disk, but the disk says that it will wipe out anything I have on my hard drive. Am I misunderstanding that?

I'm running ZoneAlarm and SpyBot...is that a factor here?

What can I do? I feel foolish because about 20% of my work on this computer is not backed up. But I feel even more foolish that I downloaded that d*mn thing from Microsoft. Everything was fine before that.

Please help,
Lou

P.S. Sorry that this is so long-winded, but I’m very, very frustrated!

sorry for the delay in getting back to you but are you still having problems with your pc