HijackThis error??

[MaFia JaK]

i just got done reformatting my comp and getting everything back to normal then doing the final step of scanning for viruses, spyware, defrag, checking the disk for errors, etc. i clicked on scan in hijack and i got this error:

An unexpected error has occurred at procedure: modRegistry_IniGetString(sFile=win.ini, sSection=windows, sValue=load)
Error #5 - Invalid procedure call or argument

Please email me at merijn@spywareinfo.com, reporting the following:
* What you were doing when the error occurred
* How you can reproduce the error
* A complete HijackThis scan log, if possible

Windows version: Windows NT 5.01.2600
MSIE version: 6.0.2900.2180
HijackThis version: 1.98.2

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i clicked ok and fixed the problems, then i shut down hijack and then opened it and scanned again and the error was gone. i am just wondering if there is something i need to fix or if that errors was just a one time thing and not to worry about it? thank you


//edit - i should add the only thing i had to remove was a no file no name toolbar entry

[VerLux]

If it didn't happen again, I wouldn't worry TOO much about it - it appears it was having trouble accessing win.ini for the time, in any case..

[SuperSparks]

I never worry about one-off errors like that. We all get them from time to time - it only needs a single bit to be misread to cause something like that, so if anything it's surprising that those sort of things happen as infrequently as they do.

[MaFia JaK]

good deal. thanx for the quick replies

[eschmenk]

I ran into the error when I ran HijackThis the first time. It was trying to read the startup entries in win.ini, which is in your Windows directory, and is a holdover from Windows 3.1 (and earlier?). (Technically, the system automatically copies the entries from win.ini into the registry, and HijackThis is trying to read them from there, but they originate in win.ini - AFAIK.) A bad program could put a entry into this section of win.ini and start something the next time Windows loaded, so that's why Hijackthis was checking.

In my case the following lines were missing from win.ini:
[windows]
load=
run=

I added those lines to the top of the win.ini file, rebooted, and everything worked OK. I consider this to be a (very minor) bug (Hijackthis should be more robust than that), and reported it to merijn@spywareinfo.com.

I realize that this is late, but maybe it will help someone else.