Works for Me: Beating Windows Vista Into Submission

My little laptop which will be doing Warhammer Online has been barfing up larger and larger chunks of Windows Vista, starting with refusing to run chkdsk on corrupt bluetooth drivers and moving on to Windows Explorer crashing whenever I right-click on executables or launch iTunes or, well, any variety of things. I've made progress beating these problems into submission; here's what worked for me:

The Right-Click Crash: This became way easier to diagnose (I think) as soon as I realized that it was just crashing on executables and their ilk -- text files were unaffected. Above and beyond that, there's a related crash message in the Event Viewer (in Control Panel > Administrative Tools) helpfully informing me

Faulting application explorer.exe, version 6.0.6001.18000, time stamp 0x47918e5d, faulting module ntdll.dll, version 6.0.6001.18000, time stamp ..., exception code 0xc0000374, fault offset 0x000b015d, process id 0x11c, application start time ....

A tiny bit of digging later and I've discovered ShellExView and a reference to reassure me that it's Not Evil. The thinking is that there's something in the context menu for executables that it seriously hosing things up. Okay. So we download ShellExView, scroll to the right to find the dates when things were installed/modified and which files they're affecting and lo and behold, there's something creepy in there called "cmdlineext.dll" which wouldn't be spooky except for the "Sony" in the publisher name. You may recall something about Sony and RootKits... Anyway, disable that, nuke that, figure that it came with BioShock -- that's the shock part -- or maybe C&C3. Don't know, don't care, getting it the f--- off my system. And wow, I can right-click on stuff now! Works for me!

Corrupt BlueTooth drivers tell me to run ChkDsk which Vista refuses to do: Okay, so there was a hole in my hard drive. That's the easy part. The hard part was actually running chkdsk because Vista was refusing to run it at boot -- it was skipping it and all the beating on autochk.exe in the world wasn't helping. Well I've got a 4-year warranty on this thing (my previous laptop cooked itself after two years of World of Warcraft) so I e-chat with Dell support and get a workaround. If you've got a bootable Vista install disc (may work with any other bootable disk, don't know -- but this is your #1 reason to get actual Vista discs which I'm pissed that OEMs aren't providing anymore; it's like selling a car that has its tires fused to the wheels...) slap that in and reboot your machine, telling your bios to boot from the optical drive (that's F12 on the Dell XPS 1530 line). Then Vista core will load from the disc and you can tell it "yes, that's fine" when it initially asks if you're going to install. Then, on the second screen, there's a bunch of options and the last one is "Repair" -- click on that, and there's more options with the last one being "Command Prompt." You want Repair, you want Command Prompt. Once you've got the prompt, type in "chkdsk c: /r" and walk away for an hour or two. The Dell support guy suspended our chat session for 20 minutes... yeah, that's not hardly enough. Anyway, Windows is no longer complaining about a hole in the Bluetooth stack directory (I uninstalled and reinstalled it), and despite having fresh problems with the Jabra I got working with my business-oriented ThinkPad, I can safely say chkdsk works for me.

Bonus -- Pwning Files: Along the way, I encountered files that I didn't own, even as an administrator. Which is bullsh|+. So here's the simplest and prettiest form of how to pwn those files...

And big thanks to NirSoft while we're at it. Now, anybody got a list of mods that need to be made to the secuRom-killing instructions to work properly with Vista?