PG 3.2 - Cannot Load Mutex 2 error??

I couldn't agree more Charles...

There's quite a lot of verbiage in print and online about the many system recovery tools and methods, including XP's own utils. Many of them, including XP's, are pretty good all things considered.

Even System Restore (SR) works on occasion, depending on the problem. OTOH, I've had my share of SR rollbacks make the problem much worse, particularly when the system was running newer versions of drivers etc, so disable it on all my systems.

I'm pretty good at hacking the registry as well, but this is primarily to apply tweaks and interface changes to the system. I rarely use it to actually get out of trouble like 'mutex' unless the solution is simple, known, and involves at most a handful of keys.

That said, I will get into the registry to explore the problem, but the fact is many keys are hidden from the user in regedt32.

Download and install the freeware reg editor 'Registrar Lite' from resplendence.com/reglite and have a boo at the difference. If you have Norton installed, you are going to see about a dozen otherwise hidden 'legacy drivers' just to mention one example. There's plenty others!

RFA, Jv16PT and on and on don’t pick up on them either with rare exception.

Whether or not you use BootItNG (optionally IFD or IFW), or other programs like Norton Ghost or Acronis, the only 3 I recommend, Ghost being my last choice, nothing beats an Image Restore to get you out of trouble - period end of story!

Worst case, this takes me about 40 minutes from a DVD, about half that time from a partition.

Those times are based on my setup. I’ve also seen Image Backups span 47 CD’s, which is going to take just a little longer. Also, you might consider a disk re-org in this case…

Using BootItNG to boot from another partition and exploring the problem partition is priceless. Sometimes the fix is very obvious, really simple. At minimum, I can get all my unsaved data off the problem partition if I’m caught by surprise - that happens.

It's the ultimate ITD Killer - Internet Transmitted Diseases - aka malware. I've yet to see any ITD, even a rootkit survive an Image Restore. Nor do I know of any instance on XP where an ITD has, no matter how deep the injection was. Win9x is another story.

In this case with the mutex error, I was onto it in a few minutes & had the problem solved in far less than an hour

My general rule of thumb - if I'm not making good headway with a problem within an hour, I restore an Image Backup. The exceptions are those instances where I'm acquiring knowledge AND have to time to spend

I've spent more than my share of time chasing problems as 'boleyd' has in this case, and I sympathize – truly, very frustrating & w/o any positive conclusion(s).

But, you can purchase Image For DOS (IFD) for $19 from terabyteunlimited.com

It will boot from a floppy, CD or DVD and Image your entire disk's primary partition, no matter what operating system/version you are using to CD's or DVD's creating a Bootable CD/DVD Image saveset. Simple, never fails, I've been using it for years and have all my family and friends using this program

boleyd's solution would have been as simple as a data backup, restoring a recent Image Backup and refreshing his data, an hour, perhaps 2, start to finish, data amount dependent.

I'm not criticizing. I'm just trying to suggest here there's *other* alternative, much easier, and far less time consuming solutions to the problems we all have with computers no matter how experienced - that's just the way it is, as it is with cars and people as well.

During my 35+ years working with computers, I've written millions of lines of code, been down many paths and made tons of mistakes, probably several thousand’s more than I remember, or even know about

XP is 30 million lines of code, more than I’ve written in my time. Bug free it isn’t, nor will be Vista or any other o/s for that matter – just never been the case!

Having a ready, bullet proof and familiar solution to these inevitable problems is going to save you a ton of time, headaches and frustration.

Image Backups are a giant step in the right direction, as significant in terms of computing as was Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon.

Image Backups are nothing new. I was using them in the early 70’s to backup mainframes.

Somehow they’ve never caught on to mainstream PC users. It will be interesting to see if Vista includes this in core capabilities, and they should, but don’t hold your breath

 

I have gone back to ver 3.15
I am having the `Mutex` problem, at startup. It only happens if I do NOT close my internet connection before shutdown. (which I have found out by accident) It happened today.
Disconnect, reboot and no problems.
May even go back to latest beta

 

After using PG (full licensed version) since it come in to the 'world', yesterday and today, I got 2 mutex error windows popups as said. Then, the box was unstable, sluggish (mostly no responding) and zone-alarm pro 6, kaspersky av 6.0.0.299 (all, lastest build) could not be load. After a reboot seemed fix the problem; but I dont really know whether PG is in 101% protection as expected.

I saw the problem when I added SMH to Kaspersky AV5 when let the system shutdown, SMH came up and I chose 'end task' for the window 'end task' came in. The mutex error persisted after then. I had to have a backup restore.

Thx for any advices.

 

After using PG (full licensed version) since it come in to the 'world', yesterday and today, I got 2 mutex error windows popups as said. Then, the box was unstable, sluggish (mostly no responding) and zone-alarm pro 6, kaspersky av 6.0.0.299 (all, lastest build) could not be load. After a reboot seemed fix the problem; but I dont really know whether PG is in 101% protection as expected.

I saw the problem when I added SMH to Kaspersky AV5 when let the system shutdown, SMH came up and I chose 'end task' for the window 'end task' came in. The mutex error persisted after then. I had to have a backup restore.

Thx for any advices.