My stupidity

Few days back, I received Adobe CS3 Master collection and tried to install it. Just before this install, I had installed Symantec End Point Protection 11.0 and my original AVG updated its virus definitions that morning. Things started going wrong after these installs and at one point of time, I could not even connect to my office wireless router. Turning off the firewall and other processes, I could connect to the router but that was not something I was prepared to do every time. So, last night, I started checking the registry and I found so many wrong and unwanted entries in it. I also found few entries which showed some intrusions in my computer. So, I cleaned up those entries manually. Later, when I rebooted the machine, it started popping up lots of error messages... Thinking that I messed up with the registry, I restored the system to couple of days back configuration to rule out any issues with Symantec End Point Protection or Adobe CS3 collection. This system restore reported renaming of many directories and Adobe CS3 was part of it. Once system booted to normal, when I tried to connect to my home wireless router, it did not. After tweaking a bit with the wireless setup, I could manage to connect but then I could not browse to any web sites. It was strange that I could ping to all those web sites though. So, till 3am this morning, I tried to fix all different problems and ended up with further messing up the registry.

This morning, with a cool head, I tried to see the damage and found that while I cleaned up some entries of registry, auto update brought some fresh entries in the registry which created conflicts for Windows Installer and InstallShield uninstaller. It left me in such a mess that I could not uninstall Adobe components.

Since most my design outputs are PDFs, I have to have Adobe's PDF maker/Distiller in working condition. But Outlook, Visio, AutoCAD and all other software could not load any of Adobe Plug-Ins.

I tried to run few registry repair software but none could help.

So, now, my laptop is undergoing a format and reloading of OS and all other software... After installing these software, upgrading them to the latest ones from Internet would be the next step and then would be the restoration of the backup...

I am getting prepared to spend another night in front of my laptop...