Windows Vista Help

[Servo]

Hey all. My mum's laptop has developed a bit of a problem, so she gave it me to have a look at. Unfortunately, I've hit a bit of a brick wall, so I was hoping some of the tech-heads here could help me out.

Basically, she was using it the other night to browse the internet, and everything was working fine. She shut it down as normal, but when she booted it up the next day, she couldn't get a wireless connection on it. Also, any time she tried it open IE, it just displyed a blank white page, instead of the usual "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage", and diagnostic options.

First thing I did was to click on the internet icon in the task bar, and hit "Diagnose and Repair". When I did that I got the following error message...

Network Diagnostics cannot run because the Diagnostics Policy Service is not running

...underneath which, it gives me the option to...

Click to open Service Control Manager
You will need to manually start the Diagnostics Policy Service. Once this service is started, you can run Network Diagnostics.

...which is all well and good, except that when I do click on the option, nothing happens. The message remains (unless I click "OK" to get rid of it), and nothing opens.

The thing is, nothing to do with the internet, or any related system tools, works anymore. They all either give me options that I can't click on (as above), open up as far as a blank white screen and freeze, or just plain don't open. So I can't diagnose the system, the network, or anything.

I googled the error message above, and found a lot of people had experienced a similar issue. The only problem is that they all shared the same solution; a system restore. But I can't use system restore because it doesn't work. Everytime I click on it, it just freezes up, so I have to log out, and then back in again, in order to regain the ability to do anything else.

Anyone have any ideas?

One guy, on one of the help forums I visited, said the internet issue started after he accidentally interrupted an update. Now, it's entirely possible that my mum may have forgotten about, or not noticed an update working in the background when she shut the laptop down. Could that be what's caused it?

It's just strange that none of the system tools are working either, which is making it impossible to resolve the internet issue.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[farmkid]

If the problem was caused by interrupting an update, perhaps you could download all of the latest updates from Microsoft (on another computer, of course), and install them from a flash drive or something. It have no idea whether that will fix it or not, but it's worth a shot.

[Servo]

How do I get them on a flash drive? I've been to the MS website, but there doesn't seem to be a "latest updates" section or option. Since I don't know what the update contained (assuming the update is the problem), I don't know what I'm looking for.

[farmkid]

I don't know for sure where to find these updates, I just know that it is possible do download them as stand-alone files. A quick Google search turned up [rul=http://www.softwarepatch.com/windows/index.html]this site[/url]. It's not a Microsoft site, but apparently you can download service packs and updates there as well. There are download links for all the updates released each month.