Hi all,

I just thought I'd post a problem here - one that I have managed to
fix, in the hope that it might help others.

My first problem was irratic behaviour in Windows XP home - Internet
explorer would not display web pages with frames properly, Mc Afee
Antivirus would not run (I could not even get it to uninstall through
Control Panel).

After some investigation I found that many services would not start
(Webclient showed stopping status, RPC would not start, Crypto service
would not start).

So I went for the repair option on the Windows XP reinstall disk. It
got to "39 minutes left to go" and failed with "signature for windows
xp home edition is invalid. Error code is 426".

After lots of searching on the net I found that I could do a SHIFT+F10
at this point to get a command prompt.

I tried renaming c:\windows\system32\catroot2 to catold. The problem
reocurred though - still setup would not complete.

I eventually found that in c:\windows\system32 there was a zero bytes
file call SVCHOST (in caps). The svchost.exe also existed in the
directory.

I deleted the SVCHOST zero bytes file and then restarted the reinstall.
It completed successfully. I now seem to have my old machine back ok
(with data and programmes intact). It could be that I did not need to
repair after alll - maybe if I had deleted the file all would be ok.

I have no idea how the file got there. Recent activities were some
uninstalls of some unused programmes (PDF995 for example) - so that is
a possibility.


Hope this help someone.


Kind regards, Ian.