Terminally Incoherent

One of my users suddenly started experiencing this problem on their WinXP SP2 laptop. During system startup they would get the following error message:

Application failed to initialize: 0×800106ba . A problem caused Windows Defender Service to stop. To start the service restart the computer or search help and Support on how to start a service manually.

Not sure what caused this, but it seemed to appear straight out of the blue. In fact I think the guy started complaining about a “weird error message” some time on Wednesday, but was unable to actually tell me the text of the error or show it to me till today. Since it popped up on Wednesday, I’m guessing that Patch Tuesday really messed up some Win Defender dependencies or screwed with it’s dlls.

Either way, here is how you fix it:

1. Go to Control Panel and completely remove Defender
2. Download a fresh copy from Microsoft
3. Install it, and get on with your day

Please note that the repair feature available in the Uninstaller did not work for me. You have to do full remove and full installation to get it working.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 5th, 2007 at 12:37 pm and is filed under technology, tech support, windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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