Filemaker Hangs on Startup - Freezes Windows!

[Cargoplex]

Please help, I randomly had Filemaker Pro 7 crap out on me on a PC running Windows 2000. The program has run fine for months, and out of nowhere, it nows freezes the whole machine while starting up (cursor moves, but remains an hourglass). The splash screen has paused on 'Initializing' and also 'Building Font Menu.' I've since done a complete uninstall, clearing out the registry and doing a clean install of FMP7 on this PC, and still it freezes on 'Building Font Menu.' I've tried emptying the Temp Folder as well as deleting what I believe were third party fonts (I could use more font advice though). Please help me!

[Reed]

Maybe there are some corrupt fonts... I don't know where windows stores this information, but maybe if you could clear out the fonts, the problem would go away.

My favorite way to "fix" Windows is to do a low level format of the hard drive and reinstall from scratch. Once everything is reinstalled and working, use Norton Ghost to mirror the install to a DVD or another drive and save that for when you have some problem later so you can easily revert to it.

Dana

[Cargoplex]

Thanks for the response Dana. Yeah, I would love to just do a clean install, but I'm avoiding that at all costs for now. I've attempted to remove all fonts, but Filemaker is still hanging on startup. Its driving me nuts!

[sbg2]

My favorite way to "fix" Windows is to do a low level format of the hard drive and reinstall from scratch.

Dana

Low Level Formatting an IDE Hard Drive

[iflurker]

Everybody loves formatting entire hard drives for some reason but I can't imagine a situation (other than actual partitition table corruption) when that is a better solution than reinstalling only the operating system. Look, if you have some inert .txt files in a Documents directory, they can't harm your system in any way and it's stupid to delete them. Everything that can cause stuff to crash is in the Windows directory, or in directories linked to by files inside the Windows directory. Either way reinstalling just Windows, without formatting, solves your problems.

When Windows starts getting all bloated and messed up of my PCs, I keep it on the disk and install a second, fresh copy of Windows in a directory called something like Windows2. Then I get Windows2 up and running --- booting up into the previous version of Windows if I need to fetch something --- and after a few weeks, when I'm fully satisfied that everything is working properly, I delete the old Windows directory. Cleans everything up and the the risk of any data loss is zero; even making a backup is not really necessary.