On startup my computer displays the message “TPSMain.exe – Unable To Locate Component. The application has failed to start because CpuPerf.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem”. How do I stop this message from appearing? It seems to have only occurred after installing the latest version of Spyware Doctor and I have been unable to resolve the problem using PC Tools. The computer is running Windows XP.

I assume that your computer is a Toshiba brand computer, as the TPSMain.exe file relates to the Toshiba Power Saver utility which runs on the Toshiba computers. This seems to provide some kind of power management functionality on the computer. There are a few methods we have available to resolve this problem. The first is simply disabling the TPSMain.exe process from loading on Windows startup. This will not solve the root problem, but will just stop the problem from manifesting as the computer will no longer load the TPSMain.exe process. This is only useful if you know that you do not need this utility. However, since the computer has been functioning alright without this utility, for the moment it may be acceptable. That said, since this utility relates to power management it may be worthwhile to investigate whether not running this utility will have any battery or power consequences for the computer.

Assuming that you wish to continue and prevent TPSMain.exe from running 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, click the “Startup” tab. This lists all programs and processes which load on Windows startup. Find the entry for “TPSMain.exe” and then untick that entry. Click OK and then restart the computer. Once the computer has restarted the error message should no longer appear on the screen. However, you may notice that a different message appears advising that the computer is running in Selective Startup mode. This simply means that not all processes are loading on startup (you have selectively defined which processes will load on startup) because you have disabled a particular process from loading on startup. This message is nothing to be worried about and you can safely tick the box never to show that message again and then dismiss the message.

However, the previous procedure does not fix the problem, rather it just sidesteps the problem by disabling the TPSMain.exe process from loading on startup. We will now attempt to resolve the problem itself, so that you can continue to use the TPSMain.exe utility. The most effective way to resolve the problem is to reinstall the TPSMain utility. As the first step, we should try uninstalling the utility. Go to the “Start” menu > “Control Panel” and open “Add or Remove Programs”. In the list of programs try to find TPSMain. If found, select and remove that program. However, if you cannot find TPSMain, or you have difficulty uninstalling the utility (perhaps it is producing an error when uninstalling the software), do not worry about attempting to take the uninstalling any further.

After the uninstallation is finished, or you discover that you have been unable to uninstall the software, we should attempt a reinstallation. First, you need to download the utility from the Toshiba website. After a fair bit of digging I believe that I have found the file you need to download, which is accessible at the following URL: cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/downloads/ta3-ts2tpsx.exe . Once downloaded, double-click on the file to commence installation. After the installation has finished, restart the computer and hopefully the problem should be resolved.

As an aside, I am unsure why this problem would have only occurred after installing the latest version of Spyware Doctor. My best guess in this situation is that Spyware Doctor may have detected a threat on your computer and inadvertently removed a file which relates to the TPSMain utility, causing the error. If this problem occurs again it could be that Spyware Doctor is detecting a false positive on a file relating to TPSMain. In this case, you may need to exclude Spyware Doctor from scanning the relevant files to prevent the problem from continually occurring.