Hello, I have a question for anyone who can help me. I have a portable hard drive that I use with my XP-running laptop, and on it I installed Acrobat 7 (bad idea to install a program on a removable drive, I know). Yesterday the portable flipped out and XP couldn't find Acrobat, so it kept looking and looking... finally I decided to uninstall and reinstall Acrobat, but (like a dope) uninstalled it with the portable disconnected. Naturally, this created a problem in the registry. I eventually got the machine running again, but noticed that the add/remove programs tool wouldn't populate. I figured out this was a registry problem, and after trying to fix it manually to no avail, I decided to do a system restore. This caused all sorts of trouble, but I finally got everythnig back to normal after undoing the restore - but there are two lingering problems. 1.) the add/remove still won't populate (no problem, I bought one of those add/remove programs to offset this), and 2.) there are a few little quirks now, such as that certain information is mysteriously displayed in another language (German, I think), such as the Windows Update notice, and a few other things. This seems to be random, and has only popped up in a few places (including the Windows add/remove, which still doesn't populate, and which displays everything normally except for the 'show updates' option, which is in German - strange!). It isn't a bother at all, and the computer SEEMS to be working fine otherwise, but I need to know if my machine is, in fact, stable again, or if there's still something I need to do to fix whatever problems are still lingering. I'm sorry for such a long post, and I appreciate any help that anyone who actually knows what they're doing (which I obviously do not) can give. Thank you so much!

See if this restores Add/Remove:

1. Click Start, click Run, and then type CMD

2. At the prompt, type REGSVR32 APPWIZ.CPL



This is another possibility:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=831430



BTW there are many free programs that have the Add/Remove feature. Two good ones are CCleaner and RegSeeker:

http://www.ccleaner.com/

http://www.hoverdesk.net/freeware.htm