FIRST: I’m not sure where to post this, please move if you need to.
I have a fresh install of XP SP2 on one of my drives, installed Sunday night. Drive was formatted first. Yesterday my boss told me that Microsoft had a “Vista Upgrade Advisor” to see if I could run Vista on my computer. I also had a fresh copy if IE7 with all the updates fresh installed from Microsoft.
I downloaded the Advisor from Microsoft Download Center, started installing it, and had to install .NET framework to continue. There was another program that had to be ran first, I think it was the Microsoft Installer update. There were four choices, but there was no description to clue me in on which I needed.
After installing the two, I then installed the Update Advisor. It gave me an error message like it was not correctly installed, please re-install. I went to Add/Remove Programs and got an error message like: run32dll.exe error This is not a valid Win32 application. All I could go into was My Computer.
As of last night upon restart: my antivirus, IE7, all programs, all Control Panel programs, my CD and DVD burners, Comodo Firewall all give the same message. And I CAN’T uninstall the darn upgrade advisor!
At this point I am considering doing another fresh XP SP2 install, since I had not added any programs except for Avast, Comodo, IE7, and D-Link software. All programs are legal and downloaded from their respective official websites. I could not even run the XP installation CD to run a repair, or remove. F12 upon reboot is my option.
But does anyone know why this happened? Or is there an easier way to fix this? I don’t really think it is a virus unless the above mentioned websites has one.