Windows 7 broken

[exile360]

Well, after a long wonderful journey, I fear my time with Windows 7 has finally come to an end.  Unfortunately I've encountered an issue that I just can't seem to find a way to fix.  You see the problem is Windows itself.  It is badly broken as you can see from the attached images and I fear there is no way to repair it.

As you can see, even Malwarebytes did not escape the damage:

Unfortunately my only options at this point are to either begrudgingly switch to Windows 10 or find an excellent glass repair service; hopefully one with reasonable prices as the scale of the damage is quite severe.  Based on my initial findings pretty much every pane of glass in Windows was affected .

OK, for those of you who don't know, this is nothing more than a custom theme applied by a nifty program called WindowBlinds that allows you to use custom/modified shell themes.  This theme in particular is called Broken Aero and it's one of my personal favorites for obvious reasons.  It takes pretty much every panel and bit of glass in the OS and replaces it with a 'broken' version, buttons 'flicker' when you hover over them like failing fluorescent bulbs and they even have custom broken glass wallpapers to match.  I just thought I'd post this to have a little fun.

[David H. Lipman]

You should have saved this for April 1.

Too phunny Samuel.

[AdvancedSetup]

Yeah, you best stay with Windows 7 @exile360 . I have used ObjectDesktop off and on for years but it is just way too buggy on Windows 10 and uninstall was broken so bad I gave up and reinstalled Windows 10 clean again. It worked fantastic on Windows XP and pretty well on Windows 7 but is not ready for prime time on Windows 10

https://www.stardock.com/products/odnt/

 

[exile360]

Yikes, that's brutal.  I'd hate to have to reinstall Windows just to deal with one malfunctioning program.  I actually own a copy of WindowFX.  It's a pretty cool program but I have had some issues with it, though I suspect it may just be that it doesn't like my newest GPU as it worked just fine with my old GTX 1060.  Of course it might also be as simple as a driver issue but I didn't feel like messing with it too much to try and get it to work right, especially since my current driver works well with all of my games and emulators, so I guess I just have to live without my wobbly jello windows, folding start menu, liquid minimize/restore effects and burn-away menus.

[AdvancedSetup]

Object Desktop is several programs, probably close to a dozen. To me it seems they're all standalone apps that the company tries to package under Object Desktop. Some seem to work in general but so many bugs and quirks and in some cases flat out just doesn't work well. So you go to uninstall and the uninstaller only removes basic parts and leaving items such as file associations still set to use it instead of reverting back to OEM and in some cases leaving tasks or startup entries to run even though the programs were removed. It just felt too ugly for me to keep going as the install of Windows 10 was fresh at the time so I didn't want to start out with junk broken and a messy registry before I really got going and installed other things. Fresh is best 🙂

 

[exile360]

Yep, they're always promoting Object Desktop to get all their stuff whenever I download/install any of their individual applications.  I don't blame you for not wanting to bother with it, but you likely could have rectified most of that stuff with the registry cleaning component in CCleaner.  I generally don't recommend registry cleaners for obvious reasons, however in this case on a fresh install of the OS it would be easy to identify the entries belonging to Stardock to eliminate them and it detects everything from missing file associations to orphaned startups and Windows Firewall exceptions to leftover uninstall entries and file registration entries for files/programs that are no longer present.  You just have to be wary of allowing it to remove everything it detects in the registry as it can be quite aggressive (like most registry cleaners), but as long as you know what you're doing it can still be quite useful.  I don't really trust registry cleaners, however at least the one built into CCleaner shows the full details of every entry so that you can investigate and determine whether or not it should be removed.  It also offers to backup the registry by default prior to removing anything and prompts for confirmation before actually removing anything even when you tell it to.  Again, I don't recommend registry cleaners, but such tools have their uses on occasion and CCleaner's implementation of it is about as safe as they come, though I still would never recommend anyone run it that doesn't know what they're doing with the registry as just with virtually all registry cleaners, it does detect items it likely should not, including many entries in the registry of a fresh Windows installation.

[AdvancedSetup]

No, if you have time (and the fee to buy the product) try it on Windows 10 and then try to remove it. It's not just the Registry. They put files where they don't belong, like malware they use some different methods of launch. It only takes 20 minutes to do a clean install of Windows 10 and one should not need to image their system or put a tracker on it just to uninstall the main product. I have no issue with leaving left over entries in the registry. They do no real harm and almost all installer, uninstallers do it including Microsoft.

For others reading, I would not even install CCleaner on any computer I own or am in charge of. Originally it was completely free and had no marketing and was much closer to open source.  Jul 19, 2017 - Avast acquires Piriform, maker of CCleaner and it has not been the same since.  Though to be fair even in the last few years under Piriform CCleaner kept growing and expanding from what it was originally. One really does not need a tool like this to manage your system.

 

[exile360]

Ah, yes many of their tools do use some funky startup methods like hooking into the shell and whatnot which, while likely necessary for many of their tools, also really needs to be removed correctly when uninstalled to avoid causing future instability and issues.

Regarding CCleaner, yes, they've definitely become far less trustworthy than they once were, though I'm still using the portable build (which they do a pretty good job of hiding with no direct link to its download page from their main site so you must enter the URL manually or find it in a web search), however I suspect it won't be long before they cease to offer the portable and slim builds (the slim build being the normal installer build, just without the bundled toolbar(s) and whatever other third party junk they're foisting on users for profit these days).

[Living_Computer]

Does the portable build use the "emergency updater" ?

I don't use CCleaner at all, i mostly used it for managing start up programs, shell extensions and that kind of stuff anyway. Now i use Sysinternals Autoruns.

I loved it before

 

[exile360]

No, it doesn't include the emergency updater so no forced updates or advertisements.  It also doesn't try to run on startup.  I too use Autoruns for managing/monitoring startups, but unfortunately there aren't many decent substitutes for the cleaning capabilities of CCleaner, especially when a good winapp2.ini file is used for adding additional locations of temp/junk/data files and folders for additional programs and built in Windows locations.

[Living_Computer]

Have you tried Bleachbit? What do you think about it?

I haven't tried it.

I didn't know about the portable version, gonna get it i think.

This forum is good, i'm already learning  new stuff.

[Hyperwolf122]

Wow, glass shattered and everything, seems pretty broke. have you tried turning it off and on and throwing it in warm rice? 

[John L. Galt]

I think I last linked this on the old forum, don't remember - but the only version of CCleaner I ever used was portable, and it was found at /ccleaner/builds

Same thing with all of their products, except this browser thing - go to the product page (Recuva, Defraggler, etc.) and then append /builds to the end of the URL.  Luckily they have not changed that.

They used to have the portable version prominently displayed, and then they made the link minuscule to find when they started pushing the installer with the AdWare, and now the link is not on any of the webpages.  But you can find it mentioned repeatedly in the forums, without having to register, just by searching for 'portable' on the forums.

I've since given up on using CCleaner completely because I simply learned how to remove the stuff I wanted removed myself.  Plus, I've had too many experiences (and seen many many more) where cleaning certain things, especially the registry, leads to all sorts of havoc, much like AdvancedSetup mentioned when trying to remove ObjectDock.  Some were so insidious they took more than a month to manifest....

Edited August 18, 2019 by John L. Galt