The Ultimate Troubleshooter — Help


If you experience problems actually installing TUT,  or you notice significant errors on trying to run TUT after a seemingly smooth installation,  then first look at the following : 

  • Anti-adware & Anti-spyware programs.   In their default configuration mode many anti-adware and anti-spyware programs often prevent new software from installing properly. This is the case of the three most popular anti adware/anti spyware programs,  Ad-Aware,  SpyBot,  Microsoft Anti-Spyware Beta,  but the problem is not confined to just those 3 protection programs.  Microsoft's Anti Spyware Beta is actually the better behaved of the lot as it gives a thorough description of what is happening and provided you take the time to read the window that might pop up when you try to install TUT,  then you will know what to do to allow the TUT installation to proceed and you will not experience problems.
     

  • AntiVirus software.   For some reason a few of the lesser known antivirus programs can also sometimes prevent TUT from installing properly.  For example, we have had instances of  Avast Antivirus  preventing TUT from installing properly.
     

  • Anti-popup software.   Similarly we have instances of anti-popup software completely preventing the installation of TUT.

With this in mind, if you experience any installation problems, or significant post installation problems, then  temporarily  disable your  Anti-Adware,  Anti-Spyware,  AntiVirus,  and Anti popup  software and re-install TUT.  Then try to run TUT.

If TUT now runs fine, then the problem was definitely one of your protection programs.  You can now re-enable all of your protection programs.

If,  however,  you still experience problems,  then first  re-enable all your protection programs,  and then try the next step below.
 


Next, see if you have a CD or DVD in any of your CD or DVD drives (or CD/DVD-Writers) — remove any disks that you find.

We have recently become aware that, for some reason, a very few specific PCs and laptops have a problem starting TUT if there is a CD or DVD in any of the CD/DVD drives attached to the computer.  We are not sure yet why this is, but we are looking into it.

If this does not solve the problem, then try the next step.
 

If you are experiencing  "Access Violation"  errors when trying to run TUT, then you may have a virus or Trojan program.  There are viruses & trojans out there which target security programs like TUT.

Therefore, the first thing to do if you experience  "Access Violation"  errors is to make sure you have a totally up-to-date reputable antivirus program  (run a manual update to be sure)  and then run a full virus scan of your PC after having rebooted it into Safe Mode  (hit the F8 key repeatedly immediately after starting your PC from cold till you get a menu with  "Safe Mode"  as one of the options).
 

The Ultimate Troubleshooter will load and work without problems on most PCs and laptops.

Occasionally, however, it may be necessary to install some Microsoft add-on features before The Ultimate Troubleshooter will work properly.  This is particularly the case for Windows 95 and Windows 98, and on some Windows XP laptops.  We could have included the Microsoft updates listed below in the installation file of TUT, but that would have tripled the size of the download, something which we felt was not warranted since in 2005 there are very very few PCs which do not have the Microsoft updates below already installed.

If you experience problems starting or running The Ultimate Troubleshooter, click on the link below which corresponds to your version of Windows :