Hi Art,
I really hope that I could help you out with this one because you really deserve it for being so very helpful, patient, and understanding with the other forum members. You always go above and beyond the call of duty from what I have seen and read...and you also always make sense to me about whatever it is you are talking about and that's a very rare thing to me here at this forum...so here it is!
I have experienced a similar problem in the past. Right now I won't go into the exact nature of what my problem was, but it was a matter of my Hal and my Windows Operating System both getting confused, or you might say a slight conflict between the two, and in turn it was causing the Hal Improper Shutdown/Reconfigure Setup Screen to intermittently appear for no apparent reason.
Here are some things that could be considered in trying to trace the problem further:
1) Does your Hal start with Windows or do you start it manually after your system is up and running? If you start Hal manually you may still have a Hal Startup shortcut somewhere that usually gets over-ridden by the operating system when you start Windows, but it will come back to haunt you from time to time.
2) After you start the Hal program do you access Hal from an Icon in the System Tray or do you have your Hal configured to Open it's own Hal Window? You can check the Hal Startup Settings from the General Options selection in Hal's menu. If you start Hal manually and it is accessed from it's own Hal Window then your problem is probably that you have a Hal Startup shortcut still residing in one of your System's Startup Folders that was automatically put there during the original installation of the Hal program. And for some reason you don't get the problem as often if you are accessing Hal from the System Tray, even though the problem still exists...it's a weird one to me too, but that was the cause for the problem I was having that I mentioned at the beginning of this posting. After I saw that I searched my entire system for any unnecessary duplicate Hal Startup shortcuts.
3) How many Hal shortcuts are on your system? Do you have any hidden shortcuts that you don't know about? Do a system Search/Find using "Ultra Hal Assistant" or just "Hal" as your keyword search. If you are using XP define the search to include all system files and folders (requires administrator privileges). When the search finishes look at the results and try to locate and account for all the shortcuts listed, especially anything named "Ultra Hal Assistant Startup". If you have a single user system then it would most likely require that you have only three or four shortcuts in total...one on the desktop, two in the start menu (one in a Start Menu Folder and the other in a Startup Folder, and no I didn't make a mistake just now, those are two different folders...Ha...Ha!), and then maybe one in a hidden system folder like C:/Windows/system32/config/systemprofile. Any shortcuts anywhere else can possibly trip up the operating system, especially if there is one or more shortcuts located somewhere within two or more of the following folders, the "All Users" Folder, "Default User" Folder, and a "Named User" Folder like the "Art" Folder, all of which are located in C:/Documents and Settings. Basically what we are looking for is if you are telling the operating system more than once to start Hal with Windows with multiple locations of the Hal Startup shortcut. It's hard to explain but somewhat easy to find if you have your Windows Explorer Folder View Options setup to Not Hide File Extensions and to also Show All System Files and Folders. You can also even look in your own Hal's Folder (C:/Program Files/Zabaware/Ultra Hal Assistant) for the shortcut.dat file and look for all the Ultra Hal Assistant Startup .lnk files in there, but the System Search is a better more thorough thing to do. I was just demonstrating about how smart your Hal actually is...he may already know about the problem and is purposely not telling you to just bust your chops! In a nutshell, you should have only one Hal Startup Shortcut in only one System Startup Folder, and this only applies if your Hal starts automatically with Windows. If you start your Hal manually you need to remove all Hal Startup Shortcuts in all of your System's Startup Folders.
4) Have you ever had a previous version of Hal on the same system that you are running now? It is possible that you may have shortcuts from a previous version of Hal still floating around on your system. I did when I upgraded from 4.5 Demo to 5.0 Full...and yes, I completely uninstalled my 4.5 before installing my 5.0!
5) Have you ever reinstalled your current version of Hal over an existing Hal installation of the same version? That is did you ever install Hal without uninstalling it first?
6) Have you ever done the same thing mentioned in 5) with other software programs? Yes, of course you have, hasn't everyone?
7) How often do you run System Restores?
When was the last time you scanned your hard drive for Invalid System Registry Entries? You need to buy a separate software program to do that if you don't already own one. I use a hacked version of one of the best on the market...Ha...Ha...Just Kidding...or maybe not!
9) In general, how often do you install and uninstall software programs? Many so-called successful uninstalls don't remove everything and that helps to corrupt a System's Registry causing strange things to start happening on a system. Most people have a ton of these unneeded leftovers!
10) If you are still reading this list you should just Email or IM me...I wanted to ask you some things about Haptek characters anyway!
Take It Easy,
Rich_A
ricramo@aol.com
PS - You can also just leave a IM message with my Hal AIM Bot: MargeneTalks, she tells me everything!
