My Devices and Printers Window Doesn't Show Anything

[Flava0ne]

When I click on Devices and Printers in the Control Panel it takes forever to open up the window, so I just click on it again and the window opens up. But it doesn't show anything at all. I've tried Refreshing the window, and restarting my system several times but still the same thing. I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, is there any way to fix this issue?

[qubit]

I'm afraid I don't know what's causing the problem, but that's one cool theme. Is it a standard built-in one or third party (tell me which!).

A little more detail about the problem, please.

When you say it take ages, is there much disc thrashing, or is it just sitting there?
What do you have installed? Particularly games with SecuROM or similar crap.
Any system utilities installed for "enhancing Windows performance" perhaps?
Any malware on it, or recently cleaned from it?
Have you run any registry boosters?
Try turning off User Account Control and rebooting. If you have registry corruption, it might just block the Control Panel, without any warnings. Catch 22 init? However, you can do it from the command line. I don't have time to look it up now unfortunately, so please try googling it.

List anything else that might be remotely useful, you never know.

[Flava0ne]

Originally Posted by qubit

I'm afraid I don't know what's causign the problem, but that's one cool theme. Is it a standard built-in one or third party (tell me which!).

A little more detail about the problem, please.

When you say it take ages, is there much disc thrashing, or is it just sitting there?
What do you have installed? Particularly games with SecuROM or similar crap.
Any system utilities installed for "enhancing Windows performance" perhaps?
Any malware on it, or recently cleaned from it?
Have you run any registry boosters?
Try turning off User Account Control and rebooting. If you have registry corruption, it might just block the Control Panel, without any warnings. Catch 22 init? However, you can do it from the command line. I don't have time to look it up now unfortunately, so please try googling it.

List anything else that might be remotely useful, you never know.

Thanks, the theme I have is custom but you don't need to install something like WindowsBlinds or anything like that. You just place the theme in C:\Windows\Resources\Themes then right-click anywhere on your desktop, select Personalize and it'll be there to select. For more info check out this link the wallpaper that you see on my desktop however was made by yours truely!

As for my problem, it doesn't just sit there and do nothing when I said it takes forever. More like, I can get a little snack to eat and finish it before the task bar reaches full when it's trying to open the Devices and Printers window. And even after the task bar reaches full, the Control Panel just sits there and doesn't even open up the Devices and Printers window. The exact same think happens when I just click on Devices and Printers one more time to force the window open and click on Refresh.

I do have Battlefield 2142 and GTA IV installed on my system, and I also have Alcohol 120% installed and I made an image copy of my BF2142 disc with it and in order for me to be able to run the image on the virtual drive without getting errors, I would have to run Alcohol 120% SafeDisc and SecuROM Cloaking in the background. But I've tried opening the Devices and Printers window with it disabled but it doesn't seem to be any different, still hanging and not showing up anything.

The only Windows enhancing programs I have installed is Piriform CCleaner and Revo Uninstaller, and both have the options to clean my registry, which I have once or twice already.

As for UAC, it's already turned off completely because I turned it off when I initially installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. But I'll try a search on Google for Catch 22 init like how you suggested and will update this post with my results.

EDIT: One of the members over at the Windows 7 Forums suggested for me to Start the Bluetooth Support Service in services.msc and set it to Automatic and it works!!! I can now see all my devices in the Devices and Printers window!

[qubit]

Hey, glad it's sorted.

But what a strange fix? Enabling/disabling Bluetooth shouldn't make any difference. It does sound like some sort of registry corruption may have occurred.

It might just be CCleaner & Revo causing problems, as they both hack at the registry. Here's why I think so:

I recently bought UniBlue Registry Booster and wish I hadn't. Every time I've used it, something has stopped working properly. The latest problem, is that Outlook 2007's search folders are broken. It's greyed out and when I click on it, I get a popup error message saying "The operation failed. An object could not be found."

I'd rather have a Windows that's bogged down and slow, but functioning, rather than one that's fast and broken.

Oh and running UniBlue didn't speed up my PC, either...

[Flava0ne]

Originally Posted by qubit

Hey, glad it's sorted.

But what a strange fix? Enabling/disabling Bluetooth shouldn't make any difference. It does sound like some sort of registry corruption may have occurred.

It might just be CCleaner & Revo causing problems, as they both hack at the registry. Here's why I think so:

I recently bought UniBlue Registry Booster and wish I hadn't. Every time I've used it, something has stopped working properly. The latest problem, is that Outlook 2007's search folders are broken. It's greyed out and when I click on it, I get a popup error message saying "The operation failed. An object could not be found."

I'd rather have a Windows that's bogged down and slow, but functioning, rather than one that's fast and broken.

Oh and running UniBlue didn't speed up my PC, either...

Well, I know exactly what you mean. For instance, if I'm in the process of downloading something pretty big like a movie through torrents and use CCleaner, my download gets corrupted and I end up having to start downloading it from scratch. Also, now that I've been using Windows 7, my HDD's don't get as fragmented as much as they used to on previous versions of Windows, so I might just get rid of CCleaner. But Revo on the other hand has really become useful to me when it comes to uninstalling programs, such as Office 2007 for example. Because when I installed the icon set for my current theme it ended up corrupting every icon in my Office 2007 Suite and the icons for the files and documents that are associated with it even with my CS4 Premium Suite. And when I tried to uninstall them normally through Programs and Features in the Control Panel, the process would fail everytime. When I used Revo though to uninstall them, even when I got the Uninstallation Error message Revo just rolled over it and continued to uninstall every part of those suites. So if you're planning on using that theme that I have in my screenshot, I highly recommend that you don't download the icon pack for it!

[qubit]

Originally Posted by Flava0ne

When I used Revo though to uninstall them, even when I got the Uninstallation Error message Revo just rolled over it and continued to uninstall every part of those suites. So if you're planning on using that theme that I have in my screenshot, I highly recommend that you don't download the icon pack for it!

Revo sounds really useful, I'll try it out. And thanks for the icon pack warning!