About a week or so ago I installed PG. I cannot tie this problem to PG because I was not aware of the magnitude of the problem or when it actually started. I cannot boot into safe mode. About half of the icons in controll panel give me the error "The handle is Invalid" and C:\windows\system32\rundll32.exe. I searched your forum but found no matches with those key words. Do any of you experts have suggestions where to look. Could it be a PG problem? I also have Spyware Doctor and Spy Sweeper running with no apparent problem. My antivirus is GRISoft's AVG. I have run updates and let them search for spyware or virus but they found nothing. I will appreciate any help or directions you can steer me. Thank you, Don
"The handle is invalid" is the message supplied when the automatically block new and changed programs box is checked. Uncheck that box and and there should be prompts for rundll32 to run the control applets. What is occuring is rundll32 was set to allow once rather than always. This is OK when one is willing to answer the prompt, but with that checkmarked box, there is no prompt anymore. Uncheck the box or change permission for rundll32 on the security tab to allow always.
FirePost Thank you for your input. I completed what you suggested and everything seems to be working fine except I still cannot boot into safe mode. I suspect that is being caused by some other problem. The automatically block new and changed programs was not checked. However, I went to the security tab and called up rundll32.exe and changed it to run always. This will not compromise my system security I hope. Thanks again for your help. It was very appreciated. Don
I have trouble getting to safemode on some systems whether because of the keyboard software turning "function keys" off or they are set too fast to get the key press in. "hadi" pointed out a utility you might like to try. BootSafe (115Kb 100% FREE)
FirePost, Be careful with the 'BootSafe' program. It works well as advertised but, my problem is not that I cannot catch the F8 key. Using the F8 key, I do get the safeboot menu. After making a choice the system starts going into the safe mode and displays a list of programs that it is installing. After several screen full of programs it drops back to reboot and the whole process starts over. It never finishes the safe boot mode. However, in the reboot process it gives me the standard safe boot menu which has the 'boot normal mode' option. Choosing that it boots into xp normally. When I used the 'BootSafe' program, it inserted an attribute in the boot.ini program which told xp to go into safe mode. No matter which option I chose the boot.ini tried to open it in the safe mode and it attempted to go into safe mode and then dropped back to reboot. So I was caught in an infinate loop. What a fine kettle of fish. Luckily, last July I made a cd with the BartPE program installed. I was able to boot to the cd and use the wordpad program to modify the boot.ini program by removing the attribute 'safeboot:networking'. Everything is back to normal again except I still cannot get into safe mode. Oh well, time marches on. Thanks again for all you help. Don
There was a similar post to this elsewhere and it turned out to be a problem on the keyboard where all the F keys have a multi use function and only being in Default if the "F Lock" was on. Do you have such a keyboard? http://mvps.org/jtsang/flock.html A faulty Nero InCD driver file, "incdrec.sys" , "Daemon Tools", or a corrupt video driver have been known to cause problems getting into Safe Mode.
