Yes, i'm quite aware of the fact that a good deal of these problems probably wouldn't bother me so if i (Used another Operating System/video card/species of sacrificial chicken), but i don't and therefore i get to pay the price.
What's happened is that somewhere, amidst a mouse driver upgrade, a security patch and a new version of City of Heroes, something when horribly wrong. Now, i can't start City of Heroes, Thunderbird occasionally won't start either, and i've blown most of the past 24 hours or so rebooting, staring at blue screens and cursing.
Things are sorta-kinda back together, with the exception that i still can't run City of Heroes, i get the lingering feeling that i'm still running an old video driver and Thunderbird only starts after i run Firefox, or if i start it in "safe mode" (XPCOM is hanging on me and i've no idea how to go about debugging that.)
i really don't want to do yet another fresh install.
(Oh yeah, Debian STILL doesn't want to talk to my network cards, so it's still far less useful for me to mess around with.)
i'm beginning to see the allure of console systems. Say what you will about them, they simply work.
Ah, well, there's always the opportunity to go watch stuff go boom tonight. i'll post pictures if they come out looking ok.
Ok, i figured it out.
i'm not particularly happy about it, but i figured it out.
Turns out that what happened was during one of the upgrades, one or more of the SP4 files got hammered. Windows, apparently, doesn't check those files to see if they're up-to-date, so it kept on reporting that "Yeah, you're up to date!"
In fact, i wasn't.
i had to go directly to the microsoft site and download the standalone SP4 updater, and run it before things were back to being more "up-to-date" than they were before.
*grumble*
