Having my first large issue on my laptop.

Yesterday, I tried installing Songbird. It did its thing, tried to find metadata, ended up renaming all of my Russian music to ????? and fucking up the metadata for my other music too. I tried fixing it, copied music from external HDD (didn't help, for some reason - Zune still showed it as ?????), and from my Zune player (better - no more ????, but still several issues, like missing songs and artist renamed to "Various Artists", which is completely unhelpful). Did a system restore from a month and a half ago to try to fix it, and that messed my computer up. Chrome would think that I have an unupdated version and tell me errors, went away after I did a clean reinstall (removing all web data). SCII fails at reapplying updates (again, probably need to do a clean reinstall). I ran four malware scans (I'm a paranoid billy - Spybot, MSE, Malwarebytes, Ad-aware), seems my computer is clean, just bugs. I'm sure I'll get similar errors with other programs.

It's a longshot, but any chance someone knows how I would fix any of these issues without fixing everything piece by piece?

Undo the system restore.

It was a good idea, but it didn't work. I think something overwrote the system restore from yesterday, same SCII problem.

Perhaps running a registry cleaner might help some of them. Other than that, clean installs of programs with problems should do the trick. As for your music, metadata is probably long gone.

I'm a sneaky fellow; I have a fairly recent backup of all my music on my external HDD, and Zune has no authority over it so it's preserved in its entirety. I'm trying to see if I can stop it from overwriting everything by recopying the music with edited Zune meta-editing settings, I actually think it'll work. Then I'll work with the troubled programs one by one. And if that doesn't work, I can do a full backup from a while ago (I have several, the latest probably from two months ago or so).

I'll need to rescan, though. Malwarebytes and MSE had found nothing, but Spybot had found 37 entries and Adaware had found 7.

EDIT: Wewt. My music is ALMOST fine. After the recopying there is, for a completely inexplicable reason, SOME weird renaming, but it's much more manageable than before and will likely take ten minutes or so to fix.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 1 2011, 11:48 pm by Centreri.

For future experiments I recommend a registry backup. The simplest form is just exporting the 5 or so base trees, but it's recommended you use a program for it.
The reason that your programs are acting weird is that you have and old registry, but an updated program. System restore doesn't touch your data and most program components, it mainly restores registry information and windows components, such as codecs and drivers.