I am Oz! The great and powerful! Ok, that may not be true, but I have accomplished some great things with my sister’s computer tonight. For starters, I added a new video card to her computer so she can finally use her new monitor with the correct resolution. The integrated graphics just weren’t cutting it.
But in spite of that, it was only a cosmetic fix, something far more devious was in her computer, and something I spent two months looking up on.
Essentially what was happening was every time she (or I) tried to open up her Internet Browser, or the Control Panel, or any program or feature for that matter, there would be a handful of “Bad Image” errors popping up. You could simply press “Ok”, make the window disappear, and everything proceeded to work fine, but c’mon, that’s annoying as hell, right?
So I am looking and looking and looking for answers as to why these particular DLL’s were causing “Bad Image” errors (for those wondering, “mazomoki.dll” was the worst offender). In the end I decided to turn to the usual solutions: Microsoft Security Essentials, and Spybot Search & Destroy. They ended up finding LOTS of errors, and I was thrilled with the ease of use, and results of these programs. But in the end, the problem I intended on solving never got solved! Every time I log on her computer, these messages pop up over, and over again. It was driving me nuts not being able to figure out how to fix it, so I can only imagine how frustrating it must have been for Katie to have to deal with it day after day.
I ended up coming to the website maximumpc.com and they offered a lot of good suggestions about how I could clean “my” computer of lots of unwanted errors. Towards the end of the article they came to a couple of programs that promised “registry” cleaners. I decided I like Maximum PC and would trust their recommendations. So, I tried the first one on the list, SUPERAntiSpyware, and while it appeared to solve a few problems, it didn’t fix anything noticeable.
After that, I made the mistake of skipping to the next ones on the list that generally looked like something I wanted to do. I thought that the problems I was having had to do with registry errors so I skipped ahead to the section that described a couple of programs that dealt with registry errors. I first installed the program COMODO and ran that. After running that program, I got similar results. At this point I was pretty frustrated and was out of answers. Fortunately, I went to the beginning of the article again.
I ended up making the wise decision to download and install MalwareBytes and ran that as soon as it installed. As you can see on the screen shot in this blog post, there were quite a few errors that it picked up even after running the previously mentioned programs. As this was running I was very impressed with the results. Of course a lot of the programs had errors of their own so I was skeptical to say the least.
A funny thing happened, though: it actually worked! I managed to restart the computer many times and not a single time did these error messages show up again. Things went so well that I was even able to enter control panel and get another problem I had no intentions of fixing under control as well.
In the end, it seems I spent a lot of time trying to fix the problem this simple program was able to do in five minutes for me. I am sure my sister is more than appreciative of the effort I put forth, but I understand the true nature of the solution and am very grateful for the solution I have just described. In the future MalwareBytes will be the first program I try whenever I have computer issues in the future. I just figured you all should know!