Rebooted my PC and this error came up when I went to open Firefox…and then Thunderbird, and everything else on my desktop. I shouldn't say that…a few things do open. But, I have never seen this message before. When I Google'd it, it says that as many as a few .dll's are missing. ( .net framework.4 and/or Visual C++ Redistributed for Visual Studio 9.0.30729.1)
Anyone know if that's what's causing this message? One person said they open the event viewer and found the guilty 'party' and narrowed it down to a single missing file.
My only issue is that I can't open a browser = so I can't d/l a file and doing it from my laptop is fine, but I can't get the PC to accept it off of a USB drive. Kind of a catch-22….
Anyone know of a clever way to work around this issue to get it to accept the file (if that's what the cause is).?
Actually, I've found a potential cause of all my issues. You'll be happy to know that it was through no fault of how I maintain or use my computer, but that it was hacked.
After extensive work on restoring it, I had a professional look at it. He had found that the PC had been hacked by Russians. They installed a malware program that got by my Norton and lodged itself in Internet Explorer, a browser I never use. According to him, it was malware that keeps one from downloading 3rd party software and it occurred the night before I had all my issues downloading updates from MS. Why Norton didn't catch it, who knows?
In any event, this appears to be the reason for my crash according to him. Once he removed the traces of the malware, the PC went back to operating 'normally' once he repaired a few items and got Win 8.1Pro installed. My only issue now is that my printer is just old enough to not have any drivers being maintained by HP, but I'll figure something out.
Just thought you'd like to know in case you ever get a quirky case like this again…
