Tuesday, October 16, 2007

New Laptop -- update

I knew it was too good to be true ... here's the note I've just emailed off to technical support.

Hi,

I today bought an Advent notebook computer at PC World Basingstoke running Vista Home Premium Edition.After installing a few programs (Office 2007, Frontpage, etc), I am now getting a window saying:

Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library
_______________________________
Runtime Error!
Program: C:\Windows\explorer.exe
abnormal program termination
[OK]

Shutting down and restarting hasn't removed the problem. If this error window is closed, or the OK box clicked, the window vanishes, the desktop icons vanish and Vista seems to go back to the final part of its power-up sequence. Then the wretched error window comes back again.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Nigel.

PS: It turns out that this is a frequent symptom of an incompatability of Vista with an old program. In my case, my old encryption program. I've uninstalled it, and the problem has gone away.
The tech guy on the phone was confident he could solve this problem, and took great pains to steer me to the one minute automated quality assurance feedback after he'd finished. I, of course, gave him 5 out of 5 for helpfulness, accuracy, courtesy etc.
So that's how they manipulate their scores!