comres.dll??

My mom's desktop is giving her some trouble, so I'm trying to figure out what's up for her. She's got an old pentium 4 running Windows XP, and for some reason every time an application starts with a few exceptions a little warning notification pops up saying that the application failed to start because COMRes.dll was not found. Firefox works, but pretty much every other program is unable to start, even system restore unfortunately as that would be my first way to fix it. Anyone know what causes comres.dll to become corrupted or lost? I'm assuming it has something to do with spyware because she constantly has issues with such things despite about 20 anti-virus/spyware programs running at once, but I can't run anything to scan for such problems. Any help other than reinstalling windows would be greatly appreciated.

Edit- Should say that the problem just started occuring yesterday for no apparent reason, though she may have tried downloading something or made a change that she was unaware of...

 

System Restore doesn't work; then I personally would try doing a Repair Install on the computer. You will need the Windows XP CD to do this. Follow these instructions, starting from the section titled XP Repair install ending @ step 6. It doesn't always have the option to Repair. If this is the case with you then I would just backup all the data that she would need and do a fresh install of XP.

And btw, having that much antivirus/spyware programs is a bit of an overkill IMHO. IMHO, a good free antivirus program like Avira plus another like MalwareBytes is all you need. Unless you are more of a careless type of user on the Internet.

 

Do you know what your mom may have downloaded or changed to cause this to happen? Based on what I've read from other sources, missing comres.dll can be caused by anything from malware and viruses to driver updates and Windows updates. However, they are usually limited to a few programs, and it seems that your case is quite severe as only FF is able to function.

Are you able to access Safe Mode upon startup? Was the System Restore you tried in Safe Mode? You may want to try that if you haven't done so. Otherwise, my advice is to check what recent changes occured in the system and try to work back on how the comres.dll went missing. You may want to try restoring the comres.dll files from the Recycle Bin as they may have been accidentally deleted (this would again be in Safe Mode). You can access more solutions you can try from here.

However, by all means, I don't recommend you to manually download the comres.dll file. Many sources in the internet will provide you a quick and easy download to re-intall in your system, but they are often outdated and include viruses that could harm your system more.

If all else fails, go for makaveli72's suggestin and try a system repair using the installation disc or do a fresh install.

 

Thanks for the advice guys, I checked with her again and she seems to have powered off the computer forcefully when it was being unresponsive, and the problem began occurring after that. I think maybe windows was in the process of updating itself and her force off screwed things up? I'll give the safe mode restore a try, hopefully that works as I don't think she has her XP CD any more (the computer is about 7 years old).

 

^^^ Well in that case, pressing F8 on the keyboard soon after turning on the computer should get you a Menu with the Safe Mode option (which I should've suggested as well to try a System Restore from as steel advised) as well as the "Last Known Good Configuration..." option....I would also suggest trying that option as well.