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On logging into the Administrator account on Windows 2000 Professional a Welcome message appears offering an introduction tour of Windows. Meanwhile, a number of icons on the desktop have disappeared, and the My Documents folder is empty. It seems that Windows has somehow forgotten all the data which was associated with the Administrator account, and it starts afresh every time the account is used. All recently installed programs are still present (e.g. Microsoft Word, CA Antivirus), however all personal data has disappeared. How can I fix the problem?

When the computer starts Windows is slow to load. Once the wallpaper is visible, but before the desktop icons appear, the following message comes up ‘Setup.ins. Cannot find the file setup.ins (or one of its components)’. This message is quickly followed by the appearance of the desktop icons. No further progress, for instance, appearance of the Norton icons in the system tray occurs until OK is clicked in the message. After clicking OK, another message appears: ‘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’. Once OK is clicked the remainder of the start-up process is very slow. Can you solve the messages and the slowness of start-up? The computer is a Dell Optiplex Pentium II 266 MHz running Windows 2000.

My computer was recently upgraded to Windows 2000 with Office XP, and I have subsequently experienced two problems. Firstly, when trying to access “msconfig” through ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ the following message is displayed: ‘Cannot find the file msconfig (or one of its components)’. Secondly, after upgrading to Windows 2000 I experience difficulty in accessing data from the A drive, despite the disks being correctly formatted through Windows 2000. Not all disks are affected, but some of the data I want to access cannot be retrieved. I have checked the device manager which indicates that the device is working correctly.

Our computer will drop-out at random times, with a black screen followed by the computer restarting. This occurs regardless of which program is open, sometimes quite soon after booting. The problem has been persistent for quite a while, without any apparent pattern. The machine is less than 12 months old. A second problem has developed more recently – most web pages need to be refreshed a couple of times before displaying. The computer is running Windows 2000 with the latest ZoneAlarm firewall, Norton Antivirus, Ad-Aware 6.

Whenever a program, which has been running for a fair amount of time is closed the computer restarts! This occurs with most applications, such as Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Microsoft Word, etc… The problem only started after upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. The computer is an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ with 256 MB RAM and a 40 GB hard drive.