When Windows starts a message appears on screen saying that ?Setup.ins. Cannot find the file setup.ins (or one of its components)? which is followed by ?Desktop. Could not load or run setup.ins specified in the registry. Make sure the file exists on your computer or remove the reference to it in the registry?. I need to manually click OK to close these messages, otherwise the Windows startup process will not complete. This is quite an inconvenience, and significantly slows down the Windows startup process. How can I stop these messages from appearing on startup? I looked in the SK archive and found an answer to this question from a few years ago, but I cannot find any reference to ?setup.ins? within the HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun registry keys. The computer is running Windows 2000.

As you would have read in the previous solution you reviewed in the SK Archive (www.siliconkid.com.au/sk_archive/windows_2000/setup_ins_cannot_find_the_file_setup_ins_or_one_of_its_components.html) this problem is caused by some process attempting to run when Windows starts. As you have searched through the registry and were unable to find any references to the setup.ins file, it is likely that the setup.ins file is not directly being referenced to load during Windows startup. Rather, some other program is loading which is calling the setup.ins file to load. Since this file cannot be found, an error message is appearing. Therefore, we need to determine which program or process loading on startup could be attempting to load the setup.ins file. As a starting point, we should disable all programs and processes from loading on startup. Go to the “Start” menu > “Run” and type “msconfig” (without the quotes) and click OK. In the System Configuration Utility window that appears, select the “Startup” tab. This will list all the programs and processes which load on Windows system startup. Write down the entries which are ticked (and currently enabled to load on Windows startup). Then, untick all the entries. After you have unticked each entry, all startup programs and processes should now be disabled. Click OK and restart the computer. Upon restart, the messages should not appear. This indicates that one of those startup processes was calling the non-existent setup.ins file, causing the error messages to appear on screen. You will now need to determine which of those processes was causing the problem. This is best and most accurately done by a process of elimination. Go back into the System Configuration Utility Startup tab, and re-enable one of the processes. Click OK, and then restart the computer. Check whether the problem occurs. If not, repeat this procedure again and re-enable another process. Continue this procedure until the problem does occur. When this happens, you will know the process which is triggering the problem. You will next need to determine the purpose of that process. If this is not clearly evident from the process name, use Google or another search engine to search for the process name. This should yield useful information on the purpose of the process. Once you have this information, it may be worthwhile searching for the process name with ?setup.ins? to see whether anyone else has experienced this problem, and if there is a fix for the issue (such as an updated version of the software). If not, you could try reinstalling the software which uses that process to see whether this solves the problem.

Assuming the problem still continues after reinstalling the software, you should next determine whether this software is essential for your usage of the computer. If you do not need this software, you could always leave it disabled from loading on startup and then manually start the software should it be needed on a case-by-case basis. That said, if you find the software is essential and must be loaded on Windows startup then we need to investigate some alternative methods for resolving the problem. For this I will need to know the exact name of the process causing the problem, so if you could contact me again with the specific process name I will attempt to provide some additional guidance on ways the problem could be resolved.