Re: Missing items in XP

"Bruce Barbour" <bbarbour@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:lIOYg.153505$R63.61547@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Patrick Keenan wrote:
"Bruce Barbour" <bbarbour@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:l%zYg.142741$1T2.131739@xxxxxxxxxxxx
WindowsXP Home edition installed and updated. However, when I had some
difficulty with Thunderbird e-mail program, ISP asked me to ping a site
and ping was not recognized as a command. Same thing with ipconfig.
What's happened? Everything else I'm running works fine. Isp man told
me I had lost essential tools in XP. How can I restore them without a
complete new installation? Tnx

This is usually a result of the PATH statement being incorrect. It's a
minor issue and a pretty easy fix. Reinstallation is *not* necessary.

You can confirm this by opening a command prompt, changing to the
windows\system32 directory, and running commands such as ping. They
should run from there, since that's where they are, and that will verify
that they are in fact still there.

To fix the problem, right-click on My Computer and choose Properties.
Click on the Advanced tab and then the Environment Variables button on
the bottom. The Environment Variables window will open. In the lower
pane, click on the Path variable and choose Edit. Make sure that the
system32 folder is listed. Here's part of the path on mine:

%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;

Once this is done, click Apply and OK back to the desktop. You might
possibly need to reboot to have this take effect.

HTH
-pk
Thanks, Guys. Pat, followed your instructions but there was no "apply"
box. User variables were Temp C:\documents and settings\Bruce Barbour and
Tmp the same?. Under Comspec in the window was
C:\WINDOWS\system32.exe\cmd.exe. When I changed to windows\system32
directory, ping was there ok. What seems to be the problem is that CMD exe
opens the user variable C:\WINDOWS\Documents and Settings\Bruce Barbour
directory and ping was not there. Do I need those user variables? Thanks
for your help, a great relief.

Once the path is set properly in that section, it takes effect system-wide
(though you might need to restart). For those utilities to be available in
other directories, you do need to have the PATH statement there and include
the %systemroot%\system32 folder (this usually will be visible at a command
prompt as "c:\windows\system32"). At any command prompt, if you type PATH
you will see the current path. If the system32 folder isn't in it, you
won't have access to its utilities. Just add the line as described
previously.

HTH
-pk


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