this is pretty stupid but majorly annoying. Brief history.. the other day computer lost its frikin mind, critical error, memory dump etc. got it all back up scanned everything was seemingly well. I did have to reinstall java and update a few drivers.. since then everything has been hunky dory except zip issues. (i believe we had a power outage which caused this when i was afk)

When I download a file as a zip and go to use windows to extract it , it says teh file is corrupt or invalid, no files to extract etc. At first I figured that well teh file was corrupt, so i deleted it didnt think any more about it. Today I downloaded a zip from vb which i know to be a safe download... When I tried to extract it windows again yelled at me and told me there was nothing to extract. when you click properties on the files it showed having 1.79mb, so I dl winzip and had no problems at all.. everything was there and extracted without issue.

how in the hell do i make windows quit bein a butt with this, other then offin windows ? ;)

Windows XP uses a DLL file to allow native zipping and unzipping of files. This file is named zipfldr.dll

Chances are, if you were hit by a power outage while away, you may have lost a sector or two of data on your computer when the drive crashed. a Power surge or spike can do the same thing (it's really important to have a surge supressor on your phone line and power line to the computer! They're only $5)

I'm guessing the zipfldr.dll file was corrupted.

Microsoft left everyone with a nifty tool called "SFC" (system file checker) to detect screwed up system files and replace them.

This tool is easily used - just insert your XP CD, click on Start>Run and in the box type sfc /scannow and click OK. There is a space between the 'c' and the '/', so be aware.

This will initiate a check on your system files and if anything is found to be corrupt, it should be replaced.

If nothing else, you may be able to manually replace the file.

thanks darlin, ill try that this weekend sometime.. and what fun is it to actually protect your computer? ;) if i did that i would never learn all the cool junk i have fixin it all