Question：I'm hoping someone has seen this behavior and can help, before I resort to trying a repair install. I'm running Vista 64 Home Premium, SP2. Just last night I noticed that when I attemp to open Task Manager, either from control-alt-delete or right clicking on the task bar, it will not open properly. After a few seconds, the typical task manager icon appears on the task bar, but nothing ever shows on the desktop. The icon on the taskbar is essentially "dead", if you will. Double clicking does nothing, right clicking does nothing, and it never shows any level of cpu activity.
This is on a 6 month old install which has worked fine until last night. I run Norton Internet Security 2009 and have never had a virus of any kind in probably 15 years of computing. What I suspect caused it is a VPN program for work I attempted to install yesterday. It had an unsigned driver and didn't install properly, so I removed it and went about my business. It wasn't until later that day that I realized task manager wasn't working properly. I have used system restore to return to a time previous to the aborted install attempt however, and it did not help although it reported being successful in rolling back.
Right now I am looking at 7 (seven) task manager icons in my task bar. I can't close them. I can't open them. This seems like it should be a simple thing to fix but I haven't been able to find a solution online anywhere. Hopefully I've explained the issue so that it makes sense when you read this but if you have any questions I'll gladly try to answer.
Thanks,
RJ
Edit: Forgot to mention I also ran System File Checker, which found no issues.
Answer 1：Problem solved...or more honestly, it went away on it's own. As far as I can tell I did nothing. I decided to go with the repair install so I inserted my Vista disk and rebooted. Just as the opening windows screen appeared (the one with the scrolling bar, not the actual splash screen) I remembered that my disk is the original Vista, sans SPs, and that I needed to downgrade my existing install before I attempted the repair.
So I just reset the machine and removed the disk. When it booted back to windows I was about to uninstall SP2 when I thought "What the heck" and opened task manager. Naturally, it worked perfectly. It's not like I haven't rebooted a dozen times since this issue appeared, so I don't see how a reboot alone changed anything. But I never really began the repair install either.
Whatever. For now it's working. I'll try to keep an eye on it for a while so if it happens again I'll be able to determine what's causing it but hopefully it's a one time thing.
Thanks anyway and sorry for the false alarm.
RJ
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