Dual Booting Strangeness

[humangreennote]

For finicky hardware reasons, I decided to dual boot both 32 and 64 bit versions of Vista on this Gateway p173x fx laptop. I installed the 32 bit version on a partition that was on the same drive as the 64 bit Vista. Easy BCD was easy enough and it was a snap to find all the right drivers that weren't all available for XP (go figure). Everything looks like it should be working well. However, that is not the truth. Under the 32 bit system, everything runs smooth as half melted ice cream. The 64 is under the weather a though. Whenever I try to open programs while running 64 vista, it now looks like it loads for a second then nothing ever pops up. I can't tell exactly when it happened during one of the reboots, and it didn't happen immediately after installing 32 because I went into firefox under 64 and downloaded a network driver and a video driver. 64bit ie (but not the other ie) work under 64, the start menu and panels work, and there are no error messages but easybcd now says that it can't find any installations of windows, various applications just don't start up that had before, the system restore says it hasn't any restore points, and Avira can't start at startup anymore (all of which the 32 bit version is capable of atm). It reminds me of trying to install various 32 bit programs, like Alesis drivers, on 64 vista and having them just stop. I did have it dual booting with Vista 64 and XP and it seemed to work fine other than missing drivers for XP and the XP not being registered. Any insight would be amazing. Thank you.

Nathan

edit: I apologize for posting in the wrong section, forgive me.

 

[Billb2]

Not sure, because your explanation of how you did the install and what you did with BCD isn't clear, but it sounds like you have programs installed on the C:/ drive, and that drives letter changes when you boot the other OS.
C:\ > E:\ and E:\ > C:\. So the programs that make registry changes when they install get confused.

 

[humangreennote]

Thank you for your reply very much. I had used EasyBCD to edit the order of the Vistas, the names of the Vistas, and the default Vista for the OS selection menu. However it doesn't matter at the moment because I've clean installed both and they seem to work well even after windows updates. Have no idea what went wrong so I can only wonder if there is some system that may have been jeopardized which Vista 64 uses to run 32 bit programs. This time I didn't use EasyBCD though, I used the command prompt to change everything manually. Thank you again for your time, though.

Nathan