Need help! CCleaner and missing DLL's

[Kevin9315]

Recently, I've been unable to install many programs (Google Chrome, Firefox, heck I can't even update certain programs) so I've begun to wonder what really has been the issue. I did a little research and I found my way to CCleaner. Now, I'm no technical genius, but I ran a registry scan (as I think it has something to do with my DLL files being either corrupt or missing). And the results were flattering, almost 1000+ errors. Included are "Invalid firewall rule" , "Missing Shared DLL" , "Missing MUI Reference" and many more files which I believe are safe to remove. Now, my only question is, if I do delete these things, and something does go wrong, how would I restore my computer? If you need anymore information based on my errors/computer specs please feel free to ask.

[kroozer]

I don't encourage registry cleaning and I doubt cleaning the registry will fix your issue.

If you must tinker with it, clean only small chunks of items and absolutely backup.

 

You can restore a backup by right-clicking it and merge.

[DennisD]

Hi Kevin, and welcome to the forum.

 

Your post has piqued my curiosity as you sound to be in a bad way, maybe even suffering from the after effects of a malware infection.

 

If you would like to provide some details about your computer ... Operating System for a start and how and when your problems started we may be able to offer some help or even guidance as to where you can get your computer professionally checked over for free.

 

Entirely up to you of course.

[Derek891]

Hello Kevin and welcome to the forum. I agree with Dennis, it sounds like you have some serious issues. But before anyone can even begin to offer any advice, you need to supply a little more information that just saying "I have a problem with Windows". Start with the following:

 

1.) What version of Windows do you have? XP, Vista, 7, or 8 ? 32 bit or 64 bit?

 

2.) Can you still start Windows? Or are you posting from another computer?

 

3.) Do you have anti-virus software installed? Are you still able to update it? When was the last time you ran a full system scan? Now might be a good time, provided you still can. It might also be a good idea to install a malware scanner like Malwarebytes and run it, provided you still can.

 

http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/

 

4.) Did you recently install any new software? If so, from where? From a software vendor's website, or from some pop-up ad advising you to do so? If you answered yes to the last question, here's some advice: DON'T DO IT! EVER! It's the biggest scam on the internet.

 

5.) Do you have recovery software available? If so, where? Your installation disks? A recovery partition on your hard drive? A recovery set you created from the hard drive? Now might be a good time to do so, if you still can.

 

6.) Do you truly believe you have missing .dll files? I'm going to offer one piece of advice here, but this applies ONLY IF YOU HAVE Windows Vista, 7, or 8.

 

Open an elevated command prompt (right click and run as administrator) and enter "sfc /scannow" (No quotation marks, and leave a space between sfc and the slash mark). This will start the system file check. BE PATIENT! This will take a long time to run. When it is done, you will be prompted to restart Windows. This will only analyze and repair the system files installed with Windows, I'm not sure about any .dll's installed by other software. They may or may not be checked.

 

I hope this helps you. This past week I spent two days trying to figure out what went wrong with my brother's machine. It constantly shut down for no reason, then restarted, went through the start-up repair routine, booted back into Windows, then 10 to 15 minutes later began the process all over again. This made troubleshooting almost impossible. I finally gave up and did a clean install to get his system back and regain my sanity.

[Andavari]

You can restore a backup by right-clicking it and merge.

 

I'd say also make a System Restore Point, since some people in the past haven't been able to merge CCleaner's backup .reg files.