Windows Vista sidebar not working

May 22nd, 2007 Paul Wallbank Posted in Windows Vista | No Comments »

I had problems with the free Norton antivirus on my new computer and I installed another antivirus. This caused more problems and I couldn’t uninstall Norton. I ran the Norton Removal Tool to get rid of it.

Now my Sidebar gadgets are all white boxes and the clock is a strange orange color and stuck on midnight. How can I fix this?

This is a problem with a lot of the bundled software on new machines. Apple’s “fat PC” ad is pretty close to the mark. It’s best to remove all trial and bundled software from a new machine before doing anything else.

It appears the removal tool affects Vista in a way that Symantec and Microsoft haven’t anticipated. In this case the scripting functions have been damaged. There’s three potential fixes.

1. Repair the Windows components.

Click the start button and in the Start Search box type CMD

A black box will appear with the “>” prompt, type the following.

regsvr32 scrrun.dll

Click enter. You will get a confirmation that registration succeeded. You may be asked to enter the Administrator password after clicking enter.

Type regsvr32 jscript.dll

Type regsvr32 msxml3.dll

Click okay. You will get a security warning which you should agree to and you might get a confirmation that registration succeeded.

Reboot the computer.

2. Install the Vista scripting shell

If that hasn’t worked the next step is to install the new Vista scripting shell. You can download this from Microsoft as we describe on our Windows Scripting page.

The website may not work in Internet Explorer if your scripting functions are damaged so you may have to access it in Firefox and go through Microsoft’s silly authentication process.

Reboot the computer.

3. Reinstall Java.

A few people affected by this have reported, Java fixing the problem. I’m sceptical, but the latest Java engine is good idea anyway.

http://java.com/en/download/index.jsp

Reboot the computer.

 


    You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

    Leave a Reply

    »