Problem with starting programs on 64 bit vista laptop. See if you can help me. Thanks

[nippyjun]

My relative brought me their laptop to take a look at as she has been having problems with it.

it's a year old toshiba with vista home premium 64 bit. She said everything was working fine up until about a month ago.

It boots up just fine, but whenever you try to start almost any program you get this message:

The version of this file is not compatible with the version of Windows you’re running. Check your computer’s system information to see whether you need an x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) version of the program, and then contact the software publisher.

Some programs if you right click on them and run as an administrator they will run but others will not.

It's as if windows won't run programs because they are the wrong bit version.

She has norton 360 on there but it does not work and i can't start it up.

I was able to install the microsoft essentials security program. It will run if you right click on it and run as admin. It found these spyware: win32/remos.hs, win32/fakeScanti and said it cleaned them. I don't know if they were even part of the problem.

I enabled the main admin account and logged on with it but still got the same errors.

There are a lot of windows updates that have not been installed yet, which i will do, i did'nt have time to do it yet. I don't think though that this is the issue either.

Any suggestions on what to try next?

Thanks.

 

[AFurryReptile]

If you already found some malware, I would run several more scans. I'd suggest Malwarebyte's Anti-Malware and SUPERAntiSpyware, as they usually do the trick for me. Because those programs used to work on that system, and SHOULD work on that system, I think this is probably malware-related.

 

[nippyjun]

Thanks.

I posted this on another forum and got this reply:

"Make sure associated services like the compatibility agent (something like that) are enabled.

A friend recently had the same exact issue, turns out his son disabled a bunch of services trying to speed it up."

Does anyone know more about the compatibility agent? that sounds like if it's not running or working it would cause this problem.

EDIT: Maybe it's the Program Compatibility Assistant Service

 

[corkyg]

Go to the program in question - right click, go PROPERTIES, then select COMPATIBILITY. Then select XP and it should work.

 

[Gunbuster]

DEP setting got changed/messed up?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Execution_Prevention

 

[nippyjun]

Update: After the microsoft live essentials ran and cleaned up the malware and all the windows updates were installed all seems to be well now. Thanks for the suggestions.