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Help & Support results never visible |
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| message from WinGuy on 05 Jun 2004 |
I've been seeing an increasing occurence of this one problem on different
machines, both on clean and upgrade installs of XP-Home.
The symptom is that the result of any (yes, any) Help and Support search
returns absolutely no entries to highlight in the left column, and nothing
at all displayed in the right column. The screen layout is ok, though, and
no errors get reported. Searching the Index works fine, though. For example,
if click Start then Help and Support and then enter a search term in the
provided input box and do the search then no list to choose from occurs in
the left pane and nothing gets displayed in the right pane, regardless of
the search term that was entered. A repair reinstall (not a full new
install) does not fix the problem, only a full reinstall fixes but of course
that is not an acceptable solution in some cases.
Anyone got some ideas on how to correct this? Only thing I found regarding
this in the KB was 309431, but the "fix" is not directly downloadable, and I
think they're talking about an improper character set being displayed
instead of the complete lack of results that I'm talking about (the article
is not clear to me about what "unreadable" really means). :(
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| WinGuy replied to Kaylene aka Taurarian on 06 Jun 2004 |
Thanks for the links, I'll try them out while waiting for response to an
incidence report (the copy of XP-P was purchased and installed clean less
than 60 days ago). :)
"Kaylene aka Taurarian" <taurarian@REMOVE_CAPS_hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:O7s5Uf2SEHA.544@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl...
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| SomewhatAnonymous replied to WinGuy on 06 Jun 2004 |
Hi, Kaylene. Just a follow-up note to say I just got done trying ALL of the
things at the links that were given. Unfortunately, none worked (tested
after each apply) and several broke Help entirely and required re-install of
Help. The annoyance persists unchanged in any respect. Perhaps it was caused
by user tinkering of themes, icon spacings and sizes, and so on but I see no
way (even with classic desktop theme) to force everything back to
installation defaults and I've gone through it manually to assure no white
text on white background settings, and so on. Amazingly, my own System
Restore service checkpoint of 27th last month did *not* fix either the Help
problem nor the themes issue (!), neither of those problems had existed at
that checkpoint following the then 100% (reformatted) clean install of
XP-Pro and having applied all the then current MS obtainable updates.
Strange problem, I'm glad this installation is under warranty because I've
seen it several times before in the last 2 months and had to do complete
restoration in result (OEM products) and that's unprofessional. No text in
right pane after a search except for *online* results, scoll bars dimmed
out, and nothing in right pane exists to copy and paste to notepad after
highlighting any search result topic in the left pane. I strongly suspect
some new virus or trojan causes this, a possible "after affect" not being
cleaned up during infection removal. But I'm just not sure, no infections
have been found.
"Kaylene aka Taurarian" <taurarian@REMOVE_CAPS_hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:%230tU092SEHA.2988@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
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| WinGuy replied to Kaylene aka Taurarian on 13 Jun 2004 |
Thanks for the list. Those utilities find nothing wrong. This problem is not
yet resolved, but it has moved up to Research status with Microsoft. Turns
out that it's an IE6 problem, many hours have been spent on the phone under
warranty. Could just reinstall WXP in total, but that is no guarantee that
the problem is truly solved and so the election was made to go for it until
the root cause is found. We've pulled every known trick in the known book so
far, with no affect whatsoever. I'll be posting back when the problem is
resolved. I do have to say that the expertise, manners, and troubleshooting
suggestions received from Microsoft techs has been very good. :)
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