[Sim-X]

ok the reason I am posting this is because I looked all over the net for my problem that I was having and couldn't find any decent answer... Checked message boards, the ms knowledge base, everywhere. Anyways so here is what happened. My hard drive with my OS on it ended up going bad. When it went bad, I had a slave drive with some data on it set up that happened to get corrupted along the way. So I removed the bad drive, put a new drive in and installed a fresh copy of xp w sp2. Did all my updates, everything ran perfect. Now I left my slave drive alone with my date on it. Some of my data got corrupted and if you went looking around in there, a message would come up drive not formatted if I opened certain folder on that drive. Some of the data was still good. Well anyways I noticed on my brand new fresh install, if I went to add/remove programs it would sit there and hang. It would say please wait while list is being populated. If I let it sit long enough it would eventually come up but something was definitely wrong. So while I am sitting here waiting for the list to load, I noticed my hard drive activity light was lit on my tower and seemed like the hard drive was very busy. So after googling some more and not finding any help I figured I would try and fix it myself.


I ended up getting what I could off my slave drive and downloaded maxblast and cleared everything out and re-set the drive and deleted and created a new partition. Well guess what, my add remove programs now works perfect after clearing out my slave drive. I'm guessing what was happening was for whatever reason the add remove programs was trying to scan Drive D: for whatever reason and it had corrupt data on it which is why it took so long. I'm not saying this is going to solve all hang ups, but I tried every tip I could find and no dice. This actually worked. So if you are having trouble take a good look at your hard drives and make sure they are in good working order. The reason I am posting this is to hopefully help someone out that was in my shoes. It was driving me crazy and the only reason I figured it out is because my hard drive light was working so hard. Let me know if this helps anyway out.

~Sim-X

[MikePw3]

Just registered on this site to thank you for posting this... I had a 100gig external hard drive which was causing the add-remove to stop working, so this post helped me no end... thanks very much!

[Master2FarManChu]

... with multiple drives.

-Sim-X

---Thank you man, you've stopped me from ripping my hair out.

---I tried all the solutions that you described. Google, Microshaft, etc., and nothing was working. I could let my add/remove programs sit for 40 minutes and nothing would come up. It must have had something to do with System Volume Information, the boot sector on the old drive and/or the fact that the old drive was also called C:\, because it didn't happen until I decided to delete the left-over folders/files from my previous installation. I was unable to format the HDD and was about to run MaxBlast myself, but it wouldn't have been for a couple more days of trying to figure it out.

---Thanks again and to use this phrase in a fitting sense...

...EUREKA! He found it!!!

[devo28]

You just saved me another R&R of winXP! I too had the same problem with add/remove programs hanging. Searched everywhere, nothing, until I found this forum.

I had partitioned my hard drive into two sections (one for workable media, the other for everything else). However I had not formated my smaller partition because I hadn't had time after the reinstall of good ol' XP.

Hence the problems with everything...read this forum....formatted second partion....wahlaaa. Problem solved.

Thanks man!!!!

[wunderwood]

I just registered so I could add to this thread. I had a similar but distinct problem. I had XP automount some network drives. I was having the same problem with Add/Remove Programs and had done a system restore and lots of things. After reading this thread, I right clicked on each of those remote mounted drives and selected "disconnect". Add / Remove programs was busy spinning away in another window. After removing all of the network drives I swapped back and it was working.

I should add that I also had a Toshiba Laptop "Safe Disk" that I also deleted and then restored. I tried rebooting and Add / Remove programs still works. So I think it was one of the network drives causing it to hang. Strange stuff.

THANKS for saving me so much time!

===underdog===