Elliot Lee

I went to my friend Steven’s house and fixed his computer. The problem was that a virus infected wininet.dll, and thus Norton Antivirus deleted it. Windows can’t work without it. Only the Task Manager would open, whether you tried a regular startup or Safe Mode. So I did some File -> Run’s and poked around to see what I could do. Eventually we found that Firefox worked, along with networking and the DSL Internet connection, so I downloaded the file. But that introduced further complications: I couldn’t extract the file because (1) the Windows extraction tool wasn’t working with wininet.dll missing; and (2) no other (un)zip software was installed.

After some time I found that, in the dialog box, right-clicking and choosing Extract All… brought up the wizard which completed successfully. Then, from the same Browse… dialog, I cut and pasted the file to C:\Windows\system32 (which is where it belongs). Finally, to open the Windows interface, I used Run to launch explorer. Bingo! Problem solved.

To ensure proper operation and prevent future problems, I noticed that Firefox was version 1.0. I updated to the latest 1.5. Then it wouldn’t work because the Norton Personal Firewall software was having problems. So I uninstalled that, opting for the less problematic Windows Firewall (I left Steven with instructions on enabling it). Then I went to housecall.trendmicro.com to run their free virus and malware scan; it’s still running now, I presume, as it approximated the remaining time as 2 hours. Hopefully that cleans the system, and I leave them with a final recommendation: get antivirus software. You’ll need it.

One thing this has reflected about myself is that I’m actually pretty darn good at this. I haven’t seriously “troubleshooted” (troubleshot?) computers for a while, and I really had no idea what wininet.dll was. Yet, although I had nearly no concrete knowledge, and no tools to work with (no laptop of my own or additional diagnostic software, and no Windows CDs), I was able to get things done. I know the DOS/Windows interface very well. Heck, I’ve been using it all my life (17 years). I can make it do virtually anything I want it to.

And so I’ve realized: I can’t do this with Linux (or Mac OS X, for that matter). In fact, if you were to throw me in a world of Linux, I’d be pretty much lost. It’d take me a year, I suspect, to get comfortable with poking it the right way. Because the truth is, I don’t know and can’t remember concrete facts. Heck, I couldn’t even remember the filename of the Windows System File Checker. But I know how the system works conceptually, and I know how to nudge the dialogs and commands the right way. I don’t know what else to say about this, but I find it to be quite interesting. It’s not like I tried to learn how to do this. It just happened. Naturally.

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