Things that have moved. So your Taskbar and Start button moved to
somewhere other than the bottom of the screen where it belongs? Click on an
empty part of the Taskbar, hold down the left mouse button and drag the
Taskbar to its proper position. If the Taskbar has become very wide, rest your
cursor on the top edge until a double headed arrow appears. Hold the left
mouse button down and drag downwards to restore to the normal width.
Vanishing Toolbars in Word, Excel or Works.
Click
View
on the top row menu and then click
Toolbars, make sure the Toolbars you want to see are ticked. If a
required Toolbar is not ticked, click that Toolbar to create the tick. The
Toolbars you need most are labelled
Format
and
Edit
. You may also wish to tick the
Drawing
Toolbar.
Vanished Toolbar and menu:
If the menu has also vanished you are unable to click
View
to restore the tool bars. You probably accessed Full screen mode
accidentally, then closed the program.
Try these steps:
(i) Open Word, then press the
Esc
key.
(ii) Hold down
Alt
and tap the
V
key. This might pull up the
View
menu. Then tap the
U
key to close the full screen mode and close Word. Click
View
then
Toolbars
and follow the instructions in the previous paragraph
(iii) If none of these steps have restored the menu and toolbar, then more
drastic treatment is necessary. The registry has been corrupted and must be
repaired. Do not attempt to do this unless you are confident about editing
the registry. If you are worried about tampering with the registry, ask a
technician to follow these instructions:-
(a) Close Word, ensure that any minimised Word documents on the Taskbar are
closed.
(b) Click
Start
then click
Run
and type
regedit
and press
Enter. The registry editor will appear.
(c) On the left hand pane click the plus sign next to the following folders:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER
then
Software
then
Microsoft
then
Office
then you will see a numbered folder in the list of folders, it will be 9.0
for Word 2000, Word 2002 will be 10.0, Word 2003 will be number 11.0.
(d) Open the numbered folder which matches your version of Word. Inside that
folder, find a folder named
Data, click it once (don't open it).
(e) Click File then click
Export.
(f) In the next dialog box, name the file
regdata
and choose to save the file to the
Desktop
so that you can
easily find it later.
(g) Still in the registry editor,
RIGHT
click on the
Data
folder, on the pop-up menu choose
Delete.
Close the registry editor and open Word to see if the menu and Toolbars have
re-appeared.
(h) If they have re-appeared, be sure to delete the
regdata
file which you saved to the
Desktop.
(i) If they did not re-appear, close Word and double click the
regdat
file on the Desktop. This will put you back to the sad situation of having
no Tool bars or menu. You may have to uninstall Word then reinstall it.
Your recent web address list has vanished
when you click the down-arrow to the right of the address field. These
addresses are known as MRUs (Most Recent Used). Your anti-spyware has
spotted these during a scan and flagged them as non-critical items. If you
asked the anti-spyware to remove them they will vanish from your Address
field. To stop them vanishing, next time you scan for spies, do not opt to
remove non-critical items such as MRUs.
Email photo resizing dialog box vanished?
The pop-up resizer dialog box fails to show up when you want to compress a
photo for emailing. This can happen for one of two reasons:-
(1)
Most frequently this is due to loading a new photo editing program that has
changed the file association for photos. To correct this, click
Start
-->Run
then type
regsvr shimgvw.dll
and click
OK. Note the single space after regsvr. To make the change
effective you must then
Restart
the computer,
Start-->Turn off computer-->Restart.
(2)
The vital Windows file
sendmail.dll
may have been corrupted due to a power cut or due to switching off the
computer incorrectly. To repair the file, double click
My Computer
on the
Desktop
(or single click it in the
Start
menu). Then double click the main hard disk (usually Local disk C:). Double
click the
Windows
folder. Scroll down and double click the
System32
folder. For safety's sake you should now put the corrupt file in a safe
place; create a new folder called
Old files.
Click
File
in the top menu bar and click
New
then
Folder. Type the new folder name and press
Enter
. Drag and drop the corrupt
sendmail.dll
file into the
Old File
folder.
Windows will replace the missing file and you should now see there sizing
dialog box when you want to send a photo by email.
If the Address field
on Internet Explorer has vanished; click
View
and make sure the
Address bar
is ticked. If it is not ticked, click it. If the Address field does not
appear, look on the
Toolbar
(probably on the far right) you should see a feint vertical line. Grab the
line by clicking on it and holding down the left mouse button. Then slide
the line to a position just above the Toolbar. The address field will then
re-appear.
Send/Receive button has vanished
from your toolbar? Buttons will disappear from the Toolbar if you shrink the
width of the
Outlook Express
window pane; this reduces the amount of room available for buttons. To widen
the window, rest the cursor on the right or left hand edge of the
Outlook Express
window frame, when the double headed arrow appears, hold down the left mouse
button and drag the edge sideways so that the window becomes wider. Release
the mouse button when your missing buttons re-appear. Then click
File-->Exit
(for once, don't click the usual red/white cross).
A website page completely fills the screen
so that your toolbar and task bar have vanished. This happens if you
accidentally press F11. Press F11 again and all will be revealed.
Outlook Express (OE) emails have vanished
This is a rare but known problem. Three to four months of emails can vanish
from one or more of your folders, eg, Inbox, Sent items, etc. This occurs
following a compaction of emails and is most likely to occur if you have a
huge quantity of emails in a folder. When OE compacts the emails it creates
a back-up of the folder before compacting it. However, it rather foolishly
puts the back-up in the Recycle bin. Do not empty the recycle bin for
obvious reasons.
1. Open the Recycle bin
by double clicking the icon on the Desktop.
Find the backed-up folders, they will be
Inbox.bak,
Sent items.bak
and so on.
You may see more than one copy of the vanished folder. Rest your cursor on them
to determine which is the latest version.
Click a latest vanished folder
and in the left hand panel click
Restore this item
.
This puts the back-up folder into the email storage folder. It will still be
listed as a .bak folder and it must be changed so that OE can open it.
2. First you must discover
where your the Email storage folder is located.
In Outlook Express, click
Tools-->Options-->Maintenance
.
Click the button labelled
Store Folder
.
Carefully write down the location address which appears (you will only see the
first part), then click the address and tap the
End
key on your keyboard. Write down the remainder of the address.
3. Close OE and open My Computer.
Click
Tools-->Folder Options. Click the
View
tab, in the list of items find the yellow folder with the label
Hidden Files and Folders
. Just below that, select the radio button labelled
Show hidden files and folders
. Now Un-tick the box labelled
Hide extensions for known file types. Click
OK.
4. Navigate to the email storage folder
. Let us assume that it was your Inbox that vanished and that you restored
the Inbox.bak folder from the Recycle bin. Locate the two folders Inbox.dbx
and Inbox.bak Right click the Inbox.dbx folder and rename it
InboxOld.dbx.
Now rename the Inbox.bak folder as inbox.dbx
5.
When you open OE you should see that your Inbox emails are restored.
Repeat steps 1 and 4 for each vanished folder.
An opening screen vanishes:
If double clicking an icon on the
Desktop
gives you a glimpse of the opening screen but it does not launch the
program, look at the bottom of the screen, you will see that your missing
program is
minimised
as an oblong button on the
Taskbar.
Left click
that button to restore it to the desktop. To avoid this problem, whenever
you minimise a program, be sure to click it and close it before shutting
down your computer.
