As I said in my last post, I rebuilt the operating system on this laptop.

It was a straightforward restore from the factory backup, which I had done before and had no problems with.  This time however, I noticed a couple of strange things happening.

The first thing I noticed was that the Vista Sidebar wasn’t working properly.  That didn’t unduly worry me as I don’t consider it an essential feature.   Maybe something had become corrupted during the install, but it wasn’t worth the effort of redoing the procedure.

Later, I noticed that I was having a strange problem with my Live Writer – it would work for a short while and then literally, just disappear.  A little irritating if in the middle of writing an article?

Later again, I was messing with some sound files, and tried to launch Media Player.  It wouldn’t run.  The icons and shortcuts were just so much useless decoration and nothing would induce Media Player to give so much as an error message.  It was as if it didn’t exist.

One error is irritating but three is more than coincidence.

I did some research on the Media Player problem and ran into loads of solutions about upgrade problems and compatibility problems, but they were of no use, as it had worked before and I knew it was compatible.

Eventually I found the solution. 

• Click Start.
• Click Accessories, then right click on Command Prompt and choose "run as administrator".
• In the command box, type regsvr32 jscript.dll, and then hit enter.
• Type regsvr32 vbscript.dll then hit enter.

Exit from Command and that should fix the problem.

Media Player ran straight away.  Similarly the Vista Sidebar was now displaying its Gadgets correctly.  Windows Live Writer is performing exactly as it should.

I don’t know why this procedure should have been necessary, as I have never had to do it before, but at least I’ll know what to look for next time….