Dear Ed,
It's no fun, but you could try a clean reinstall of Windows 7 on your least important system.
Most W7 systems come with a reinstall DVD or a recovery partition.
Wipe out the existing installation, reinstall W7, turn off W7 updates, and install AC.
If AC works, turn on W7 updates and expect to run up to 200 W7 updates overnight.
Then install your other programs, one by one, checking as you go to see if any of them kill AC.
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Or you can try as many of the three repairs listed below as you can stand on your least important system. The first two, tweaking and combofix, are most likely to help, fairly easy to run, and quicker than reinstalling W7.
Each of the three repairs (tweaking, combofix, and revo uninstall with cleanups) have solved mysterious AC problems for my clients.
The repair programs are all free and available at
www.majorgeeks.com***
1) Try tweaking.exe with all repair options checked and anti-virus disabled. About half an hour to run.
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2) Try combofix.exe with anti-virus disabled, also about half an hour to run.
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3) Use Revo uninstaller (
www.majorgreeks.com) to do a full uninstall of all the AC programs, not just the main AC program (sort by date in Revo's detail-view and all the programs with the same install date are part of AC).
Delete the empty AC folders, which are easy to find with everything.exe.
Run ccleaner.exe's registry and file cleaning options.
Run Wise Disk cleaner and Wise Registry cleaner (with deep option)
Run Auslogics Registry cleaner.
If anything is left of AC after all this, it's darned well hidden.
Reinstall AC.
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Cheers,
Carl Fogel
