Get Inside the Loop

Does anyone know of a way to disable the "tinkering" gene in guys. I am pretty sure I have it. I know my father had it. He could spend whole days in the garage working on some broken piece of equipment, investing hours of labor before abandoning the project and calling it "just tinkering". Well I have a XP laptop with a glitch that in got during a .NET update, so I am always getting odd messages and activities in other programs. For instance, in the middle of using TurboTax last year for taxes it glitched the program so it would not startup. Had to move the whole thing to my iMAC to finish. Recently I added Microsoft Office 2007 and now it is always starting up the installer. It also firmly rejects any Microsoft updates. I tried using Microsoft FixIt, but it just freezes up.

I think any sane person would have scrapped the laptop and moved on. However, with my "tinkering" gene I just keep trying to fix it. I can spend hours of time trying a whole host of possible solutions. Like now, after running the FixIt and having it stop and just sit there, I rebooted to find I now have an account for Guest and ASP.NET Machine.

Looks like a great afternoon of "tickering" ahead.