Today my Toshiba laptop (Satellite A105-S2071) ran a Windows update and promptly displayed a new error message when the system rebooted.
Usually I rush to write down any error message so I can track down a solution later. Today I decided to try a screen capture instead. I use a great screen capture program called TNT that loads on startup. I usually have it set to capture a free region at 75% of the displayed size so I can grab any part of the screen from my browser or other applications. If needed I can reduce the size later.
The above image was reduced to 400 x 100 for this blog article.
Microsoft doesn’t offer much help to anyone who gets error messages like this. The system doesn’t give any option to print or save the error message or search the Microsoft Knowledge Base for a solution. Users are pretty much on their own to find out what happened, why it happened, and how to stop it from happening again. In other words — good luck, you are on your own.
I usually search Google for the file names (without extensions) and get enough information to proceed. Today’s error was a tricky one. Way to much information from sources I was quite willing to trust.
I finally found out the error referred to the Realtek HD Audio Sound Effect Manager. So I searched Google for: Realtek HD Audio Sound Effect Manager Toshiba. The top search result was forums.computers.toshiba-europe.com — what I would consider a trusted source of information. Unfortunately, the information was not directly related, so I searched the forum for hhctrl. The first item was on target. Reading the message thread I found that cypriano,one of the forum users, had already tracked down a fix on the Microsoft support site.
In case you run into the same problem, the solution that cypriano found was http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935448/en-us. The title of the page is: The Realtek HD Audio Control Panel may not start, and you receive an error message when you start the computer: “Illegal System DLL Relocation”.
I downloaded and ran the fix from Microsoft, rebooted, and the error message was gone.
I think that Microsoft should offer better help for this kind of situation. I tried searching for both rthdcpl and hhctrl on the support.microsoft.com site and didn’t find any helpful information.
Back to capturing error messages: I think it’s useful to keep copies of the error messages because you might see the same or similar errors later. Although almost any screen capture program will work, I’m a big fan of TNT Screen Capture which is very flexible and easy to use Windows program. An evaluation version can be downloaded from the same site.
