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One of our Windows XP x64 Pro machines suddenly would not run tasklist.exe (lists processes in cmd line) anymore. It gives "ERROR: Initialization failure" when run.

Things I've looked into:

-any s/w installs recently? No.

-is tasklist.exe even on the machine? Yes, it's in C:\WINDOWS\system32

-checked path/environment variables? Yes.

-have you tried running it by typing its full path? Yes, but it still gives the error I mentioned above.

So I'm not too sure what else to look for right now. Any help is appreciated :) Thanks.

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Is this the only program that does it? Does procexp from sysinternals work? Can you run a "Clean" 64 big copy from another machine, if you have it available? chkdsk find anything wrong on the drive that may have corrupted it? Antivirus/spybot find anything suspicious on the system? – Bart Silverstrim Dec 7 '09 at 14:37
Just wanted to add that procexp and taskmanager works. However, we have an in-house tool that uses tasklist to check for duplicate processes of a certain type and takes appropriate action. This just happened one day and I don't know why shrugs – Glen Y. Dec 22 '09 at 21:19
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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Rebuilding the WMI repository did the trick. Just posting the solution that I found in case anyone else runs into something similar...

In cmd:

net stop winmgmt

Rename the %windir%\system32\wbem\repository to something else

net start winmgmt

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Make sure you run this command with administrator rights.

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Sorry, I forgot to mention that I was logged in as admin at the time. – Glen Y. Dec 7 '09 at 15:12
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