I need some help pretty desperately now. I've been trying to fix some computer problems and I'm usually fairly competent at it but now I'm close to tears and facing reformatting my laptop- something I just don't want to do.
I don't know the true source of the problem. In the wee early morning hours of January 14th, I was running an advanced search in Outlook Express of my Inbox. I do have a great deal of saved messages (1.8 GB- though I didn't realize it was that large then). My computer crashed during the search and I just turned it off for the night. The next morning (still the 14th), I rebooted the laptop and opened Outlook Express and I had lost all my e-mails from July 18th, 2007 to the present day. I rebooted a couple of times just thinking it might have been a hiccup, but it wasn't.
I have OfficeRecovery and ran Recovery for Outlook Express and while it did seem to recover all my messages, it didn't recover any attachments. It took a bit of time as well since my laptop is close to 5 years old: 512 MB RAM, 80 GB hard drive with only 6 GB of free space (now after I've deleted some things). My husband has Advanced Outlook Express Repair on his computer so I copied my inbox.dbx to his computer and used that to restore my e-mails.
Advanced Outlook Express Repair though was running very slowly and using just about all of his system's CPUs. It had been running for 12 hours and was only at 3% progress. Worrying about tying up his work computer or about him accidentally closing the program. I started searching for another e-mail recovery program and found ScanDBX. I have to admit that I didn't want to spend the $38 for the software (my husband's a casualty of the economy and it's pretty tight for us right now) so I went looking for a pirated copy. Looks like I learned my lesson, I found one and when I followed the directions I couldn't run the .exe file. I then found a second one but instead of ScanDBX, some Blackbox Data Recovery program opened up. I was frozen with fear and dread, quickly closed it and uninstalled all the files. This was the evening of the 15th. All this time, I hadn't opened Outlook Express and didn't use my computer for anything else as it's primarily used for e-mail.
Yesterday, I wanted to run a virus scan on the whole system since I was very nervous about the two questionable programs/sources and saw that Norton wasn't running. Then I recalled that with all the reboots I'd done over the previous days, they were all relatively fast, compared with all the time they usually take. While I did notice at the time that the reboots were fast, it didn't dawn on my to wonder why.
The error I was getting with Norton is that C:/........../ccApp.exe is not a valid Win 32 application. Doing a quick Google search, it seemed the answer was an uninstall/reinstall. I went to Add/Remove Programs and tried to uninstall it- no go. It starts and seems to get to the end but then nothing happens. I let it try the uninstall overnight last night but all I had to show for it this morning was a warm laptop. I've downloaded the Norton Uninstaller and that starts to run and then fails- I don't recall if there's and error or if it hangs up as well. I've tried to reboot the computer in safe mode, safe mode with networking and safe mode with command prompts but all I get is an error saying that Windows failed to load correctly. Windows will load normally though. I have Windows XP SP2 (I think SP2 anyway).
I then downloaded Kaspersky's trial but I can't install that since Norton's still on my system. I tried to manually uninstall Norton, but that didn't work. I then downloaded AVG free. That begins to install and also fails, same with Avira's Free Antivirus software. I then tried Trend Micro Housecall and Symantec Security Check but both of these just hang up as well.
I remember that Norton's uninstall was hanging up on a .msi file. I also noticed that one of the others that I tried had a .msi error. I did go to system.msc and started windows installer and changed it from manual to automatic but that doesn't seem to have helped.
So the bottom line is, I don't know what caused the problem I'm having, the initial crash while doing the Outlook Express search or something bad that I installed on my computer while trying to save $38. Please help, if not for me, then for my husband and kids who have had to suffer along with me these last few days!
-Janice
