Greenknight

Though it stretches the bounds of the topic slightly: Jose is a graphical Chess tool. You can store chess games in a database (backed by My SQL), view games and edit variations and comments, or play against a "plugged-in" chess engine and use it for analysis (to analyse why the computer beat you so badly ). You can view the board in 2D or 3D, and it has other features too numerous to mention (because I'm too lazy). It's a great tool for the serious chess player.

Ahh, now it becomes clear. Your OS is haunted by the evil Ghost of WinME. I think lokoike's last suggestion sounds about right. Rescue what data you can, then reformat that disc. Then get an excorcist to sprinkle Holy Water on the computer.

However you get it fixed, once you've got it running again install ERUNT: http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/ Enable the AUTOBACK.EXE tool, which will keep daily backups for 30 days. Have the backups made in the default location, a subfolder in the Windows folder which you can access from the recovery console. And print out the section of the documentation that tells how to restore the registry from this backup when Windows won't boot. Then you'll have no problem fixing it if this ever happens again. The instruction for ERUNT seem pretty complicated, but it's really not that hard. Just ignore all the optional stuff and stick to the defaults, that's all you need. If you do have trouble figuring out AUTOBACK.EXE, it's quite simple to make backups manually, but you have to remember to do it.

Once you are running the Recovery Console, you can get help on the available commands by typing help at the command prompt.

Install some program, then uninstall it. CCleaner will then detect an uninstaller reference issue you can test it on.

Just back them up when you delete them and you can always restore them if deleting them creates a problem. Annie Brion is correct, though, deleting unused file extensions is not going to cause problems.

Why wait? It's free, so you can always switch to the .NET version later and it won't cost you anything. I've got it, no complaints here (all I've done with it is burn photos onto CDs, though).

Actually, the word bigdog is a link to CCleaner.com. The author of the review is Alex Muradin. MajorGeeks lists the author of CCleaner as Spazmatic. I don't worry too much about it.

Are you sure you removed the Firefox profile folder? In Win2k and XP it's in a hidden folder, as explained here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder

This is why a backup function is included in the program. There's always a slim chance something like that can happen, with any reg cleaner (and with some, it's not that slim). CCleaner is probably the safest cleaner around, but nothing's ever 100% safe. I don't back up everything the Issues scan finds, because I'm an experienced user and I recognize many of the entries that come up as safe to delete. If I see anything I don't know for certain is safe to delete, that gets backed up. If you're a beginner you should always back everything up. Now that you know there's a problem with deleting that particular entry, uncheck it when it comes up, so it doesn't get deleted.

It's not something that normally occurs, it happens if you visit a website that's been hacked to make this happen. It's a kind of lame exploit. You can avoid it with the NoScript extension, it has a function to truncate long URLs. Or just clear your history, like I do, after every session. <edit> I should add that this problem is fixed in Firefox 1.5.0.1, currently available as a release candidate.

I do turn of my resident AV when doing those scans (unless I forget). It's good that you brought that up, though. Some people might not be aware of that. When running any other virus scanner, whether online or not, you should shut down your resident AV protection.

You don't have the power to close this topic! Seriously, though, I have seen this on the Firefox Help forum. Too large a history.dat file can cause crashes. Not the same as the cache, rridgely.

By "newest version", he means the new beta version, not the current release.

Don't feel too bad, that had me fooled, too. (for a minute).

You don't say what OS you have, but if you're using WinXP or ME, System Restore will use up more and more memory, unless you periodically delete the old restore points.

I'll be sure to let those other guys try it out before I do . Looking forward to the change log.

zaphirer has a good point. Hard drive space is cheap, and by today's standards 13 GB is pathetically small. You really need to add more.

What's sad about this is that many of those who use urinalysis to screen employees refuse to believe it. I told one guy about all the things that could produce false positives, he denied them all. (I wasn't applying for a job, this was in the local Eagles lounge). He absolutely insisted that those tests are reliable, wouldn't even listen.

Foxit is great if you just need to read PDFs. For those who need the additional functions provided by Adobe (like creating PDFs), they can speed it up a lot with this: Adobe Reader Speed-Up http://www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk/ It quickly disables a bunch of Adobe plugins that almost no one uses. It can restore them just as quickly (which you have to do to update Adobe).

After I posted that about the BitDefender online scan, I found out there's a version of the BitDefender scanner you can download for free! BitDefender 8 Free Edition:http://www.bitdefender.com/PRODUCT-14-en--...ee-Edition.html It's just the scan engine, without the realtime shield. I decided it would make a good backup for AVG, so I'm trying it out. I can testify that it's quite a bit faster than running the online scan (about 1/2 hr, for me), though still pretty slow. It uses a little memory all the time, up to about 20 Mb, even when it's not running (I don't understand why). It doesn't seem to slow down my computer any, though.

Karen's Replicator does make automatic backups. I don't know how you'd go about automatically compressing them, maybe you should ask Karen .

I just found out there's a free version of BitDefender. BitDefender 8 Free Edition http://www.bitdefender.com/PRODUCT-14-en--...ee-Edition.html It's an on-demand virus scanner, without the realtime virus shield of the paid version, so it can be installed alongside your resident AV program. To quote from the website: "BitDefender 8 uses the same ICSA Labs certified scanning engines found in other BitDefender products, allowing you to enjoy basic virus protection for no cost at all."

There really isn't any point to leaving your computer running all the time, it's just a waste of electricity (=money). With early computers, there was a point to doing that, but there isn't anymore. And rebooting straightens out a lot of things, as you just discovered.

I tried that MSWLSC scan, it was also pretty slow. But if it works well, that's what's most important (and I have no way to tell for sure). I do like the way it can scan for open ports. If it can actually close the open ports, that will provide users of the XP firewall something that's been lacking up to now. I ran a BitDefender online scan the next night, also a long process (2 hrs 35 min to update and scan). It found 2 suspicious files the MS scan didn't, but they might have been false positives. I had set the option to have it ask me for a prompt if it couldn't heal the files, but instead it just deleted them. So I can't check those files to find out if there was anything really there.