[lraibley]

Any help or suggestion would be greatly appriciated here. I recently did something to my vista home premium laptop and now I am having a headache of problems. When I try to start the computer regularly i get nothing but a blank black screen and a cursor with a message that says "The ordinal 874 could not be located in the dynamic link library SHELL32.dll". I have no idea what to do about this. It won't let me do anything except start the tack manager after pressing ctrlaltdlt. I have a windows vista disk that I tried to start from but I don't know if I'm doing it right because it doesn't seem to be starting from it. I just get the same startup every time. It is an upgrade disk to vista, as I upgraded from XP, so i don't know if this is why it won't start from the disk though. If anyone can offer any advise on what to do about the error itself or tips on how I may be able to start from the disk I would greatly appriciate it.

[rgreen4]

Ok, a Vista upgrade disc can be use to boot the machine. Go into the BIOS setup on your machine and make sure that the laptop is set to boot from DVD/CD. You can set the boot priority in the BIOS, and most offten it is set to boot from the HD. Even if you put a DVD/CD in the drive it won't boot from there unless it is told to do so.

Then when it starts, after you get the scrolling screen of text, it will say attempting to boot from CD/DVD, and may ask that you press any key to boot from CD/DVD.

Then when you get into the setup process, you are given a choice of doing a repair or an install, try the repair first. It will seek out any corrupted Vista files and try to fix them. If that does not work, post back. Do you have any files that are at risk on the HD? That is important files not backed up?

Have you tried to boot into safe mode?

At what point do you get the error, After Post and before Vista starts to load (green moving bar) or after that point?

[lraibley]

I get the error message after the laoding screen. It goes through the normal screen where it says welcome and stuff, but when it should then be loading my desktop i get a blank screen with nothing but my cursor and the message.

How would I go about setting the priority in the BIOS?

[rgreen4]

When you get the very first screen (which is sometime called the spash screen if it has the company logo on it) there are function key options along the bottom. Be prepared with the "pause" key and as soon as you see choices along the bottom press that key. Some HP's use F1, some use F10, some after market boards use ESC and they will probably have brackets on either side just to highlight the choice. You don't enter the brackets.

This will then take you to a BIOS setup screen, generally blue with white lettering. The first page is about the HD, date, time, etc. and you will want to come down to the advanced page, hit enter to access the advanced page and look for something like "Boot Sequence" or "Boot Priority".

I will be gone for several hours, but hopefully when you post back one of our other regular members will pick up on this discussion and continue.