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cannot open control panel

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o0akoni0o

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 31, 2004
Messages
1,301
well i installed vista home premium just a couple days ago and until now everything was working fine. today i start it up, do some tweaking, and all of a sudden i can't open up the control panel. i tried to expand it in the start menu but it shows up empty! tried running gpedit.msc but i get a message saying that it is missing (not sure if this is attributable to me having home premium versus business or ultimate).

edit: windows update will not open up either
 
I think I have the same problem as you. Can you open any of the bundled games that come with vista? Here's my post from a week ago. After a google search I found that a lot of other people are having trouble opening the control panel in vista:

http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=435655
http://www.buildyourown.org.uk/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=25393
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=144134
http://forums.techguy.org/windows-vista/582826-solved-vista-problems.html
http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=64831

There are a couple solutions suggested in some of those posts, but I have yet to try them.
 
I have the same problem, I don't know if this fixes it permanently, but its better than having to reboot constantly until it decides to work.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showpost.php?p=2220415&postcount=6

1) Launch services.msc from a run command
2) Find the SL UI Notification service & stop it
3) Find the Software Licensing service & stop it
4) Restart both services, starting with Software Licensing

Hope this helps

Edit: Simply restarting the Software Licensing service does the trick. Definitely not permanent.
 
Use system restore if nothing else helps. I have had the same problem. Im not sure what causes it but when that happens i cant get into my device manager either. Good luck mate
 
Restarting the software licensing is a fix that works for me, but it isn't permanent.

I just got back from a 2+ hour support chat with Microsoft. Totally useless. They did a remote desktop connection to my pc and I basically just watched them futz around the whole time. At one point the person who was controling my pc lost the chat window and he opened up notepad and we conversed through that, lol. His guess was that my user account is corrupt. I'm not so sure about that.

Anyways, I think it may be overclocking related. I backed my processor back down to its rated speed and restarted about 10 times. Each time I could open control panel and everything else ok. I then put the cpu back at 3200 and the problem happened on the first startup. Are you guys overclocking? Try running stock and see what happens.
 
Before anything crazy goes on, perhaps I can shed some light. I noticed that some of you have your CPUs OCed. I simply added a little bit of juice (smallest increment did the trick for me) to make my system more stable. I'm at 3Ghz, when I dropped down to 2.8Ghz all was peachy. That solved the problem for me (more voltage as you can see I'm back at 3Ghz). Also, you can still access the Control Panel, just not from the Start Menu. You have to go into My Computer, find the folder tree within "Control Panel" on the left-hand column and go to the individual sections under the Control Panel (or where ever you're trying to go within the Control Panel). Hope this helps.

P.S. I've tried disk check, reformat (long time ago lol), defrag, and all kinds of other small things. I've never had a problem since upping my voltage for stability. Only had to up it 0.025v.
 
Software licensing did the trick for me too, but my OC has not failed any type of orthos or 3dmark run. Tho I have started noticing my monitor going into power save and not coming back. And just tonight the Dell threw out, "Entering power save mode" while playing ET: Quake Wars! In XP, I ran 3600 on the chip, I'm down to 3200 in Vista...perhaps there's something I'm missing?
 
well, i am having the same problem, and the stop/start service is working for me as well, i notice that my usb drive that i use for speedboost also needs to be restarted as well....

as far as the OC being the issue, i disagree, as when i did my initial vista ultimate install last week, on my OC'd E6600 @ 3.5 ghz, the vista aero interface worked well, then randomly started dropping (ie, bad control panel/ 3d windows flip), then i would reboot, and it would work sometimes, sometimes not.....

upon reading this, i reduced my OC and found no difference! there must be a way to fix this problem without having to manually stop/start the service! maybe create a batch file that does it for me upon booting? i noticed the problem was worse when i added a 2 gig usb jumpdrive for speedboost on the weekend, after that, the control panel would work only 10% of the time......

ive heard that some people are running into the same problem on stock systems as well, as our IT guy at work says its been an issue with his home PC since he installed vista months ago.

any input on this issue is greatly appreciated!

so far its the only glitch with my vista install that ive noticed, and its annoying the hell outta me ;-)
 
I think I can trace the roots of this bug all the way back to the alpha. I messed around a lot trying to produce bugs, and I noticed that disabling/turning off the licensing service would cause certain things to take forever to load up...namely the control panel (and I believe, device manager). I figured this was by design to prevent illegal use of the OS. Chances are some hardware/driver is preventing these services from starting up properly. The only service that depends on these services is ReadyBoost, although I don't know if that's relevant.

I should mention that I got this to occur only when Vista was unactivated. If these services are already set to automatic and it causes problems on every reboot, the quickest manual fix is to create a batch file to restart them.
 
Maxx said:
I think I can trace the roots of this bug all the way back to the alpha. I messed around a lot trying to produce bugs, and I noticed that disabling/turning off the licensing service would cause certain things to take forever to load up...namely the control panel (and I believe, device manager). I figured this was by design to prevent illegal use of the OS. Chances are some hardware/driver is preventing these services from starting up properly. The only service that depends on these services is ReadyBoost, although I don't know if that's relevant.

I should mention that I got this to occur only when Vista was unactivated. If these services are already set to automatic and it causes problems on every reboot, the quickest manual fix is to create a batch file to restart them.
Click to expand...

Hmm, good idea perhaps. Also I hear that batch files are none existant in Vista or require some retooling (UAC off or on) of how you would normally make and/or execute one. If anyone has any input on that (that doesn't require 7 steps, UAC off and/or on) then please post :) .
 
Miscommunication said:
Hmm, good idea perhaps. Also I hear that batch files are none existant in Vista or require some retooling (UAC off or on) of how you would normally make and/or execute one. If anyone has any input on that (that doesn't require 7 steps, UAC off and/or on) then please post :) .
Click to expand...

I would probably use the net command, you can use this to start/stop services. You may indeed need to be elevated to do this, but you could run the .bat manually after startup (run as administrator). A .bat file is nothing special, you can type it up in notepad and rename to .bat.

To be more specific, you'd use something like,
@net stop "service name"
@net start "service name"

*edit*
I just tested this myself with UAC and it works, you do have to right-click and run it as administrator.
 
well... i noticed today when i got home from work it took some updates. (i have uac off), and i also noticed when i rebooted, it was all working well.

so i resatred and fudged my OC up to 3.51 from 3.4 ghz, i increased my fsb, vcore to 1.475, and my nb up to 1.5(i think),

anyways i rebooted, and it all works fine... so much for the OC theory. i dunno, its fixed, for now... i did like 6 reboots in a row, all is good.
 
patch tuesday!! We'll see how it goes. I didn't bother to look since there were NINE of them!
 
ARRRGGGG.... false alarm. its doing it again, i just booted up, and its the same old. had to manually restart the service...
 
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