I can appreciate how important pictures of your grandson would be and I have
offered ways to save Vista without reformatting if it can be done.
I am terribly sorry to read about this tragedy.
Doug when I wrote about repairing Vista using Startup Repair as Far as Win
RE what cascade got you to "know one addresed that" as to the problem you
couldn't "get into Vista."
I'm not going to lecture you, but backup is as important as anything you do
with your computer and backup should be a routine whether or not you are
using a Beta. When you use a Beta, you must read the release notes--they
aren't perfunctory--they mean something and you must backup.
Let me try again. You have nothing to lose by using Startup Repair to fix
Vista. I spoonfed you how to do this and many of the things Startup Repair
as part of Win RE in Vista can fix. You need a Vista DVD to access startup
repair. I'd reread what I typed you.
IE is always part of the Windows OS and it's tightly coded to Win Explorer
and for that matter both are tightly coded to OE and surprise some parts of
Outlook as well.
MSFT has some reasonable, important tips in their release notes for Vista
and IE and the IE team blog is doing a pretty good job of trying to give you
information on issues and features of IE7. I'd consider it very helpful
reading to keep on using to Vista RTM and beyond.
1) I suggest you attack fixing Vista by using Startup Repair per my
instructions.
2) You can try to uinstall IE7 from Vista or from wherever you mistakenly
instlled it--you said it was Vista, but right now I don't think you'll be
successful and I'd try the Startup Repair.
3) I am really confused as to what the status of your XP is and I'm not sure
where those pics are but if you have an XP that's not working, then I'd try
to use F8 Advanced options and then do a repair install if those don't work
booting from the XP CD.
I don't know if you dual booted or if you upgraded to Vista from XP. I wish
you would have spelled this out stepwise instead of run things together. I
can't even tell if Doug and djm are the same person.
As to repairing a Windows XP:
1) I'd use the F8 options including the 3 safe modes (I'm omitting VGA for
this purpose) to try to system restore and I would use Last Known Good if
they don't work. I say 3 because sometimes one works when another will not.
If you use safe mode command, the command for system restore is:
%systemroot%\system32\restore\rstrui.exe
2) If you have the XP CD you can go to bios setup and put booting from CD in
#1 position and then try a repair install with the CD. That's a lot faster
and has a lot more success than using the Recovery Console and any of its
commands and yep, MSKBs sometimes mis-recommend the Recovery Console. The
corrupted registry KB is one of the most notable for this.
A repair install offers you the way to get your XP back intact after
watching a 35 minute banal Microsoft commercial in setup.
Repair Install
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/tips/doug92.mspx
The MSKB that is a model for my approach is this one:
Resources for troubleshooting startup problems in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308041&Product=winxp
Good luck,
CH