Java Causing System Freeze / Lockup

[Stormblade]

Hey guys,

Ok after days of having my system seem to lock up for no reason I think I've tracked down the culprit. It seems that any time the JRE is accessed on my machine it causes a lockup. I've tried the following and each results in a system lockup.

• Trying to uninstall using the Control Panel
• Trying to verify version using Firefox / Chrome / IE
• Trying to reinstall using the offline downloadable

I launch into safe mode and I can verify the version using Firefox / Chrome / IE. So I was thinking maybe some program was preventing it and causing all this so I uninstalled my nod32 antivirus. I shutdown SpySweeper. I disabled my firewall. I then went an uninstalled my graphics driver and turned off every program that was running.

And still it froze when attempting to even verify the current installed version. And any attempts to uninstall fail with a freeze. I also found a program that was supposed to remove old versions but that didn't help me at all.

Any help would be most appreciated guys as I've been banging my head on this for a while now.

 

[Puppies04]

Is this any help? http://www.java.com/en/download/help/cache_virus.xml

 

[Stormblade]

Sadly no. I'd just recently tried that in fact. I also used CCleaner (After making a backup of course) and only cleaned the registry. I also deleted the Java directory itself but now when I try to uninstall it tells me it's missing a dll. I was able to get rid of the entry in the uninstall list but I couldn't reinstall.

Man this thing is worse than a virus. I've had an easier time removing one that this.

 

[Stormblade]

Well I finally found the proper registry entries to clear the old so that I could reinstall properly. Someone had a batch file even. I was able to reinstall (Ran as admin just in case that was the issue) and all seems ok now. Now we'll see if that solves everything.

 

[corkyg]

Doesn't your CCleaner make a copy of the Registry before cleaning?

 

[Stormblade]

Doesn't your CCleaner make a copy of the Registry before cleaning?

Sure does although you can uncheck that option. Not sure why anyone would do that though. But yeah I have a copy of the registry before the changes but so far so good.

I also made a restore point before I did that because I'm paranoid.

 

[Stormblade]

Just wanted to follow up this thread in case someone else has the problem and is looking for the ever elusive solution.

My solution was of course to reinstall the JRE but first I needed to be able to uninstall the old one which was proving stubborn. After deleting the directory manually and then using CCleaner to clean the registry I had to also delete the following two registry keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft\Java Runtime Environment
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\wow6432node\JavaSoft\Java Runtime Environment

The first key I'd already deleted. It was the second key that I somehow missed. If you don't want to manually mess with the registry, you can just run this in a batch file.

reg query hklm\software\classes\installer\products /f "java(tm) 6" /s | find "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" > deljava.txt
for /f "tokens=* delims= " %%a in (deljava.txt) do reg delete %%a /f
del deljava.txt
reg delete "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft\Java Runtime Environment" /f
reg delete "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\wow6432node\JavaSoft\Java Runtime Environment" /f