I have acquired my son’s old laptop. I wanted to get rid of several programs and miscellaneous materials, but I have encountered a problem. When I open the control panel and click on Add or Remove Programs, that utility does not open. The hourglass shows for a few seconds, then disappears, and nothing happens. I have also tried right-clicking on the icon and clicking Open, with the same lack of results. How do I restore functionality to that utility? The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 8600 operating on Windows XP. – John DePue
A. If this is an easy fix, it will be sweet, but if not, oh my! Most likely the problem is that the icon is corrupted on the Control Panel that is supposed to take you to the Windows tool for adding and removing programs.
If so, you can bring up this display without the mouse clicks by using the Run tool that is available when one clicks on Start. In the input box for Run, type in appwiz.cpl and click OK. This will bring up the window showing all of the programs on the computer, along with buttons to remove any or all of them.
If some slack-jawed, drooling hacker got deeper into the laptop’s innards and corrupted the display setting for Add or Remove Programs, you probably can get around things by booting the computer up in Safe Mode, which starts the PC without running any of the background programs that could be your culprit.
Q. I have a weird problem. Running XP, doing a lot of video editing and putting the machine through its paces, I loaded all the Google desktops the other night, and after it crashed (hung up) I went to Control+Alt+Delete to find the Windows Task Manager. It came up, but the menus on the top were gone.
There was no way to get rid of it once it was up, other than to go to the Start menu and just shut the computer down and restart. Have you ever heard of this? – David Johnson
A. Mister Computer Question Answer Person hates to admit he’s never heard of something, but I fear I’ve never heard of this wrinkle on problems that seem to crop up when folks load a whole lot of those free tools from Google like the Google Toolbar and the Google Desktop.
If I were you, I’d start by using the Windows Add or Remove Programs control panel to remove all of Google’s stuff on the computer (click on Start, then Control Panel and then Add or Remove Programs). This should restore the Windows Task Manager to its proper configuration, with menus on top, because the uninstall software is supposed to remove all changes made to system settings, along with removing the selected program.
Contact Jim Coates at jcoates@tribune.com.
