Fix after Stuffit Expander

Recently I had to install a program on my Windows XP PC to decompress a .sit Macintosh file, so after a little search I found a program called Stuffit Expander.

After the installation I noticed my menu bar looked a little different.

I had to uninstall Stuffit Expander cause it only supported a .sitx file format. But it was too late, the program made some strange changes to my system.

This is what happened to my PC when I installed Stuffit Expander and how I fixed my PC.

-Quickstart: The quick launch icons disappeared, the quick launch menu moved to the right part of the menu bar.

I moved the menu to the left, made new shortcuts and drop them inside. To restore the "Show desktop" shortcut I had to write this command on the run menu "regsvr32 /n /i:U shell32.dll".


-Firefox: Didn’t had to reinstall it but all my shortcuts disappeared, all my extensions were lost, all my themes deleted and my search engines lost too.

Fortunately I was able to recover my bookmarks by editing this file: "%AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles.ini" it appears that a new profile was created so I just had to load the one I was using before.

Go to "%AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default" there you’ll find 2 profiles I used the older one, all you have to do edit the “profiles.ini” and change the Path= line to the location of the profile you want to use.

More info on this page http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/profile

That recovered my bookmarks and some plug-in configurations.

I couldn’t recover my search engines, extensions and themes. But luckily I had a recent backup made with MozBackup http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/ that’s why it’s important to regularly backup all your data :•)


-Skype: It was the worstly affected program.

Complete reinstallation of the program was needed due to an exception when locating the mouse pointer over the tools menu.


-Google Earth: myplaces was completely deleted.

Couldn’t recover myplaces .kml file. It was the only data I couldn’t recover :•(


-RealPlayer: When I opened it behaved as if it was the first time I used it.

I just had to reconfigure the options as I had them before.


-QuickTime Player: When I opened it behaved as if it was the first time I used it.

I just had to reconfigure the options as I had them before.


And who knows if those were all the changes Stuffit Expander made to my system, I guess I’ll have to wait and see if other problem pops up.

After my experience I wouldn’t recommend you to install any program (at least for Windows OS’s) from SMITHMICRO or ALLUME SYSTEMS DIVISION.

This applies for Windows XP.