dumb aussie shiela stuck in safe mode

Shiela,

Regsvr32 is a program to 'register' a dll. That's (often) necessary when some setup program puts a new dll somewhere around (might be in c:\windows\system, but could be elsewhere).

I'm pretty sure this isn't a Microsoft supplied Windows file. The only tools.dll that I have on my (Windows 9 system is located in c:\program files\Spybot - Search and Destroy. But, of course, it's a rather general name, and 'everybody' has the full right to use it for a dll (that's a kind of library of small modules used by a program).

So please tell more:
a) The recent history of your computer. Did you install something just before this happened?
b) The location of tools.dll on your system. Use Windows Explorer to find all copies.
c) When found, right-click>properties and see if you can find out anything about it on the version page.
d) Start>Run>MSConfig, go to the startup tab, and see if there's an occurrence of regsvr32 trying to do something with one of the files you found. If so, uncheck it if it's checked. That might help you to come in Normal Mode again.
e) Finally, go to a Command Window, try to register the file from the command line (see http://www.nophadon.com/knowledge.asp?category=Technical&aid=41 for a quite nice example) and tell us the exact error it gives (it's possible to copy and paste from a command window, but it isn't self-explanatory, alas). Of course, you need to add the path before the filename in that example, so in my case it should be:
regsvr32.exe "c:\program files\spybot - search and destroy\tools.dll" (note the quotes!)

With all this information, it might become clear what the problem is. It should be much easier to have the machine near at hand, but in this case we rely on your patient and careful work to supply the information.

Hope this helps.


Kees

I had the same problem when I had ME. It was a bad virus so I had to re-install ME. It was a pain so I set-up Zonealarm (free) and used Spybot and Lavasoft everyweek and never had a problem again.