Vista Problems

When I lauch cmd.exe, it opens up to a black box with a blinking white cursor and doesn't do anything more...

When I try to open Notepad.exe, Windows says there was a problem with Notepad.exe and it must close. This appears before I even see Notpad.

I could live without notepad, but I have to have the command prompt.

This is a new install. Any ideas?

How can you live without Notepad

No, sorry, I have no idea what the cause is. If it's a fresh, new install, I'd reinstall it again, but if you want to do some minor troubleshooting, try launching these programs from another user's profile or from safe mode to isolate the issue.

How about other programs, by the way?

I know that both CMD and Notepad are located in Vista's equivalent to c:\%windir%\system32\ so I'm curious if other programs whose roots lie in there are messed up too.

That's exactly what I did; I created another user account and tried to launch them from that profile. The same problem occurs.

I too noticed both cmd.exe and notepade.exe are in the same folder. I checked the permissions on everything in the system32 folder and there are none; so I added permissions to cmd and notepad, but I still have the same issue. Do you know what permissions the folder should have?

I figured if nobody here has any ideas I will just format and reinstall. I tried to upgrade Vista over itself but that gave an error and failed. I would just need to format and do a clean install.

Wow, that is pretty crazy. But I'm wondering if permissions is really the cause. Usually permissions issues would represent themselves with "access denied" errors....

Anyway, the permisssions for the groups that I have for c:\windows\system32 (default) are:

TrustedInstaller
- special permissions that are not inherited with all Allow check boxes checked and permissions applied to "This folder and subfolders"

SYSTEM
- special permissions that are not inherited with all Allow check boxes checked EXCEPT Full Control, Delete subfolders and files, Change permissions, and Take ownership check boxes checked and permissions applied to This folder only

SYSTEM
- special permissions that are not inherited with all Allow check boxes checked and permissions applied to Subfolders and files only

Administrators
- special permissions that are not inherited with all Allow check boxes checked EXCEPT Full Control, Delete Subfolders and Files, Change Permissions, and Take Ownership check boxes checked and permissions applied to This folder only


Administrators
- special permissions that are not inherited with all Allow check boxes checked and permissions applied to Subfolders and files only

USERS
- special permissions that are not inherited with only the following Allow check boxes checked -- Traverse folder / execute file, List folder / read data, Read Attributes, Read extended attributes, and Read permissions check boxes checked and permissions applied to This folder, subfolders, and files


CREATOR OWNER
- special permissions that are not inherited with all Allow check boxes checked and permissions applied to Subfolders and files only

And if those don't do the trick, you can throw in the "Everyone" group for giggles but that's about all I can think of

Those are for Vista Home Basic, by the way.

Well, I decided to be lazy and format! I reinstalled Vista and everything seems to be working great. I also decided to check Dell's website for new drivers and found the drivers Windows installed were several years older. My BIOS was also two revisions behind.

I want to get my system clean so I can try that Free Open Source Ghost program