Thanks for that DH...you've jarred a memory of me recently using CC Cleaner on both of those system but not on the other two. Isn't always the one factor that the person asking for assistance with forgets or neglects to mention? This would explain everything though and honestly, I've never had a problem with it in the 5 years that I've been using it but it only takes once. The fact is that I've always felt the same about such software as you but for some reason that one caught my attention. Not any more.

On the subject of sleep/hibernate...that was something that I just turned off on this fresh install and is something that I've always gotten away from right out of the gate. Almost exactly like you but with 30 minutes to turn off the display and I actually keep my systems on 24/7 (have done so for the past 20 years without issue...yet). Having said that, it's probably best for anyone else reading your advice to follow it to the letter. I could probably just consider myself luck that I haven't fried something yet. Knock on anything.

I've learned so much more about my system over the past week than ever before. The amount of detail that I now know about my motherboard, drives, and drivers just amazes me. It's even more impressive that there are such great people out there with such valid information that they're so willing to share to no benefit of their own. Gaming tech support forums are awesome.

well there are many reasons why i suggest shutting down the computer when not in use..

there are numerous myths as to why you should leave it on.. and some people get confused between shutting down to totally cutting the power to it.. and shutdown standby vs simply standby.

First off.... no one in their right mind would leave their car idling in the garage or outside 24/7.... while it's totally innefficent to do so.. that's not argued... what is argued sometimes is, what's easiest on the car.

The fact is that everytime you go to start your car, there is obviously some startup related "wear" that occurs each time... it's hard on vehicles to repeatedly shut off and start frequently through the day....a good example is many shippers doing diliveries, is actually statistically going to do more damage and cost the company more (or themselves) by shutting the vehicle off at every drop point (unless they are going to be there for an hour or more usually obviously).... sure they are burning fuel.. but in the end the cooling and reheating that takes place between off and on WILL/DOES always do things, not to mention all the other related parts of the vehicle. (i'm also a light duty and heavy duty mechanic "somewhat"...)... Many of these things are directly related and can be discussed about computers...

Now leaving your car running for extended periods of times can and does do damage when not in use... idling is typically somewhat the hardest thing on a vehicle.... not true for a computer... BUT what is hard on both is things in both have basically an HOURs of life expected... For example even though there are few moving physical parts in the computer, fans and standard hardisks DO have a lifespan.... motors wear out and die/burn up.

Top it off, if something happens to go wrong while your away for long periods of time..... this can result in the total destruction of a computer in the event that it fails to shutdown and stay shutdown, most machines will continuously reboot which CAN and i've personally seen, resulting in TOTAL disk corruption or physical damage to the drive or other parts of the machine that happened to fail.

Anothing thing is.... some people that shutdown there computer have a habit of shutting down followed by flipping the switch in the back AND/OR flipping a switch on their surge bar/pulling the plug.

THIS is extremely hard on the eletronic components in the system and should be kept to a minimum. The only time you should ever flip the PSU switch or the surge bar switch/unplug is when your doing major changes to the system, such as cmos resets or replaceing a video card.. (generally it's still wise to leave things plugged in so that at least the ground still continues to work as a valid grounding point for static discharge)

Another thing is people buying surge bars... specially cheap ones... This is understandable mistake yet completely useless.

I can ask majority of the public one simple question.

When was the last time you EVER had to reset a surge bar?

So far..... i've never gotten a responce saying YES excluding one which was due to overloading the circut unrelated to a computer....

Surge bars are mostly a joke.. they are designed to typically trip at an extremely high voltage point... something that modern PSU are designed and can easily cope with dumping excessive voltages/power quite often through the ground or other methods of curbing this issue. (at least with good quality PSUs)..

What KILLS a computer fast is undersurges/brown outs/LOW voltages. These really really really hurt computers. droop/spikes factor in obviously but there is only so much eletronic components can take before they fail.

The only way to protect against these is to invest in a UPS.... and trust me.... for at least a DECENT UPS... personally i prefer APC.. something in the 600VA range as a minimum is plenty for most people and will provide a good long lasting use. I've a ups that is almost 10 years old that still holds a great charge.. (it's always a good idea to do a battery drain on them every once in awhile)...

Really i could go on and on about different subjects surrounding the computer systems.. but it's alread 2am here and i intended to head to bed at 12am lol..

nice read, thanks for all the input from everyone.
So i was looking into buying a surge protection soon... but this is just a waste of money it seems.

unfortuantely yes..... a surge bar is pretty much nothing more than a glorified multi plug adapter.

HOWEVER there are a few surge bars that do have ACTIVE "AVR".. these are not cheap... most people just go out and get a 5 or 10 or maybe at most 20/30 dollar surge bar... figuring it's going to work...

but for about 40-60 bucks, you can get a GREAT surge bar with AVR which is "automatic Voltage Regulation".... it tries to control the over volting the best it can.. it still however cannot do anything about undervoltages. It is probably my first step recommendation..

however for that price.. you really aren't all that far from a UPS (uninteruptable power supply), so if you already that far into plunking down some cash... it's better to save a bit more and splash down on a good UPS covering all the bases..

Keep in mind that when i recommend the 600va for most people.... which is about a 60-90 dollar value..... some people playing on the machines they have today may require something in the range of 800-1000va as a minimum which may double that price value. I still highly recommend APC as the UPS of choice.. but cyberpower has recently found it's way into my stock as doing very well... for a cheaper price... a good alternative... get one with an LCD to view current load/wattage draw/voltages and expected current load to time remaining in the case of a power outage.

Well this svcks! I've got another corrupt profile...again.

I'll create another thread if need be but figured that bumping this one might do for now instead of cluttering the board if I don't have to. I just don't understand what is causing this so I have no idea how to avoid it from happening. Everything was going well as I had installed all the drivers without any issue. The only other things that I installed were MSI Afterburner, Xplorer2, and Notepad++ (all of which worked perfectly). Then I installed Monitor Calibration Wizard (without any issues) and played around with Gamma Panel...then the problems began. I remember playing with Gamma Panel before noticing the corruption that caused me to re-install in the first place. I had tried to install MCW after using Gamma Panel before but it wouldn't install due to the corruption so I'm leaning more towards Gamma Panel as the culprit (you don't actually install it...just run the exe). I've run Avast, Ad-Aware, and Malwarebytes on all four systems and they all come up clean. And before anyone asks...NO, there is no porm being surfed on these systems. I have other means for that.

The symptoms:

• Try to install and get an error message that I don't have permission for the temp folder.
  
• Relocate the temp folder and it will move the install along the extraction but will popup an Installer Service not active error (even though it is active).
  
• Even if I get passed all that it tells me that I don't have permission to access Program Files, Program Files (x86), or Program Data.

This happens on my user account (set as Admin of course), on any new user account that I create, AND with the Administrator account. How can the full blown admin not have permission?

I've tried resetting the permissions back to default as per Microsoft's instructions but no luck. I've tried just about everything. The only thing that works is to move the exe file to the temp directory itself but this isn't really feasible when installing from disks. Also, I can't uninstall anything either. It's as if the system no longer has any user with administrator privledges.

I'm at a loss. Can a simple program like Gamma Panel cause such destruction? If so, how can one tell if a program is going to do such a thing? I've used this app on multiple systems over the years without any issues. It's not made for Windows 7 but I hadn't had any other problems running older apps before.

Please, anyone...come to my house and fix my system for me. I'm confused.

any program that requires administrative rights to "change things" can always been a potential risk..

As i'm not familare with gamma panel.... if i want to change anything i always use the devices (monitor) controls first and then if that isn't enough, then look at the display drivers own setup.

Is it possible that this is your issue..... potentially, As if it's directly changing some settings within the user account or direct access and changing system settings, it could be corrupting that file in the process.

Short of me trying it and seeing if my system buggers up too.... all i could say is .. maybe try not to use some of those things for awhile... to next time you do a reinstall (in your case potentially quite soon)..... pace the space... and do a system restore checkpoint prior.

Can you do system restore back prior to the installation of those programs.

could even be xplorer2.....

OR a combination of both.... who knows.

Either way, without know HOW gamma panel works entirely, and how it changes/accesses certain files..... and considering it's not supported on windows 7... it very well could be as i had mentioned, changing/placing certain files.... or changing registry settings in a way that results in corruption of the user profiles... either way is bad.

A system RESTORE should resolve (should keyword) being this close to a fresh install of windows.

I've tried just about everything to get this fixed but it looks like another re-install so I'm going to take the opportunity to see if I can reproduce the issue and nail it to GP or not. I don't really care if it's causing the issue or not as I can just forget about using it...I just want to know so that I can in fact avoid such issues. It's the not knowing if it's going to randomly happen again after all the work that is most bothersome. Time to experiement.

Yeah, I only used GP because certain older games screw up my custom windows calibration thus forcing me to reset it after each play session. Nvidia CC doesn't help with this because it suffers the same fate. But since I can get a profile via Windows, and my monitor itself, I'll just have to learn a different way of resetting the profile. I also think that if GP is the issue then it's time for me to say No to any app that's not fully Windows 7 compatible. Not worth the risk.

It's also just such a weird issue as I don't get any Corrupt Profile error messages but rather just the install / remove issues. I can still use the system without any other issues, including editing and saving files in any folder. Just weird.

EDIT: System Restore doesn't work in this situation since it just gives the error that I don't have permission to change such files. Same thing happens if I try to re-install Windows 7 via the disk while inside Windows 7 (read that it would give me an Update option to fix potential problems). Lastly, I've also checked the disk and every other built in Windows diagnostic program available and they all report that there's no issues found. The Event Viewer is exploding though of course.

Actually there is quite a bit to be gained --- I partition it to 120GB for the system and the remainder to a storage drive partition -- main advantage is if anything goes wrong on the system you can reformat the 120GB. partition and reinstall WIndows without touching the rest of the HDD, so all of you other programs and storage files remain untouched -- If you leave it as a single partition then doing a Fresh install later becomes a real hassle since you have to back up everything - reformat the HDD and then reinstall everything. I also have a 250GB external drive and by having the system drive limited to 120GB can keep 2 full backups of the main partition on it so can update the backup every month by simply replacing the oldest copy on the external and always have a secondary backup in case something slips by causing the most recent backup to be corrupted.

If you boot from the windows dvd... then select from the menu when it comes up "repair your computer".... it should take you into a mode in which you should have FULL admin access and unrestricted mode allow a system restore to complete. I would personally PICK the system restore so it may be a wise idea to not just go with the one it recommends. Don't do the startup repair.. that's not your issue....

example

http://gallery.techarena.in/data/519/02_win7_repair_4.JPG

http://itgossips.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/windows-7-startup-repair-7-560x420.jpg

Could the underlying issue be with the Install Service itself in so much that I might be able to repair that somehow? I just found out that I can Uninstall from the Administrator user account but that account still has the install issue. Also note that I can install programs in any user account if I move the downloaded exe to the temp folder so I'm wondering if it's just that the Installer Service has someone been shifted to not recognize the temp folder properly (or any other system folder) unless the file is in the folder itself. I find it odd that I'm told that I don't have permission to access that folder when trying to install something but I can just navigate to that folder and do whatever I want with it (including deleting it or moving it elsewhere). Why the selective permissions? Maybe, just the Installer Service? At least that's what I was thinking.


Do you install all your applications (not games) onto the main partition or different?

When you run applications after a re-install do you have any problems or do they just update the registry accordingly and run with your previous settings intact? I keep my games on a seperate partition but I always format the entire drive and re-install everything. Would love an easier approach.

I did everything else there except the System Restore since I already had it in my mind that it wouldn't work. I'll have to try this.

While games haven't had any issues at all with being installed to a different partition...... some programs still do however.. actually plenty of EA's games requiring another set of programs to be installed (even without your permission they are installed) that are directed into the program files...

HOWEVER.. you can move the entire Programs Files folders to another partition.... without an issue..

Doing a full fresh install and then letting it retarget that folder will keep some of your original settings in tact... however i've encountered numerous registry related issues and general problems with doing this.

If your going to do a fresh install... it's ALWAYS best to do a fresh install of the programs.

Typically this can apply to the usual games, however there isn't much involved registry wise, and you saved games/files will be up to date making it much faster. In an example.. skyrim..... install windows fresh... install steam to your desired location, even if it's to one that already excists.... it'll replace/update the files needed, and apply it's own update, and then install skyrim and it'll load everything off the hardrive mostly. updating anything that fails the integrity checks.