27 May 2011

Windows cannot open Help and Support because a system Service is not running

I was auditing a server this week and attempted to open MSINFO32 but received the following message "Windows cannot open Help and Support because a system Service is not running".

When investigating services.msc, I couldn't find the Help and Support service listed, so I Googled a little regarding registering services and found a fix in the form of the following commands.

Open a Command Prompt  and run the following commands
%SystemDrive%
CD %windir%\PCHealth\HelpCtr\Binaries
start /w helpsvc /svchost netsvcs /regserver /install

The Help and Support should now be listed and can be started and was enough to get MSINFO32 running.. hooray!

16 May 2011

vmware.exe - No Disk

When starting up VMware Workstation I was receiving the following error which I believed to be related to the recent change of the removable USB drive's letters on my laptop.


I researched this and found that there was no obvious registry entries but instead that the details of the VMware Workstation favourites tab were recorded in a %appdata%\vmware\favorites.vmls

By deleting this file, I found that this resolved the error and then found that it's then recreated once VMware Workstaiton is restarted.