Help & Support does not work on Windows2000 machine

[Guest]

W2K workstation will not load Help & Support. Windows.chm. Narrowed down to
hhctrl.ocx. The file is older than on cd. After trying to copy newer
version and registering, it still gets overwritten with the old version.
Running SP4. Main application is ArcView GIS.

 

[George Hester]

Windows 2000 does NOT have a "Help and Support." It is called HTML Help in Windows 2000. "Help and Support" is Windows XP nomenclature. Are you saying when you go to Start | Help it fails?

 

[Guest]

sorry my machine is XP. On this particular W2K machine, the Help function
does not work. Start, Help blows out to "Cannot Open the File:
MKMSITStore:C:\Windows\Help\Windows.chm". Found KB article related to
Win98 but not reference W2K. Tried copying newer file hhctrl.ocx from cd but
every reboot the file is overwritten with the older version. The newer file
is registered before the boot.
Ran Spyware utilities and reran SP4.

 

[George Hester]

Copy this link exactly as you see it:

mkMSITStore:C:\WINNT\Help\ntcmds.chm::/net_time.htm

and put it in Start | Run | paste it in | OK. What happens EXACTLY? Please tell me what error message you get or anything which occurs after you hit run. Please understand this is looking to C drive so make sure your %SYSTEMROOT% is C:\WINNT

The fact that hhctrl.ocx gets overwritten is a good thing. We will deal with that after I figure out where your trouble is and as of yet I don't have much to go on.

What version is your IE Browser? What service pack is the machine at?

 

[Guest]

We ran this on a known good 2000 machine and it pops up to IE with the Net
Time help file obviously. On the machine with problems, this popped to IE
and had the message: Page cannot be displayed.

This is a W2K workstation running SP4. The IE version is 6.028 SP1.

The main app on this station is ArcView GIS (ESRI) and MS Office 2000.

Virus protection is up to date and scanned - McAfee.

Hope this gives you a little more to go on. I have not seen this before so
there must be corruption somewhere within the help files.

 

[George Hester]

No corruption. The issue is the Show Help Cumulative Security fixes to IE 6. The only fix for this that I know works is to install a update for the issue. Unfortunately at Service Pack 4 this is either not possible or the fix they have for it now I have never seen work. What you can do is uninstall IE 6 go back to IE 5.01. Then reinstall Service Pack 4. That should get you working again. But if you go back to IE 6 the issue will come back.

I have pointed this out many times both here and elsewhere.

There are a whole slew of these security fixes and all basically lead to what you are experiencing:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS04-023.mspx

The fix for this is NEVER install any of these Show Help secutity updates to IE and if you can install:

http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;811630

Supposedly Microsoft has this fix updated for SP4. I do not have it at the tip of my fingers because I doubt it works.

 

[George Hester]

Oh as a side note there is one other thing you can do:

Start | Run | regsvr32 hhctrl.ocx | OK | OK

If that doesn't help the issue are these cumulative security updates to IE. Sorry.