I have an HP Pavilion a600n that had a failing hard drive. The computer would not boot. Doing a chkdsk found multiple errors. I replaced the drive and copied the files from the old drive using xxcopy. I then did a repair install of XP which went smoothly.
After booting, the computer has some strange symptoms. First, Windows is not saving any history at all. The 'run' dialog does not show any recent entries. The start menu is void of any of the recently run applications. IE also does not seem to be saving any temporary internet files nor keeping history.
I also am not able to download anything in IE. Anytime I click on a link for a file to download, I get an error that says:
Internet Explorer cannot download [filename] from [site].
Internet Explorer was not able to open this Internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later.
I'm sure this is all related and that it probably has something to do with a corrupt file/folder or two or many, but I'm not sure how to fix this. A fresh reload of Windows is a worst case scenario and I don't want to do that unless I absolutely have to.
