I have two relatively easy suggestions:

This sounds like it could be heat related. Check/clean the air inlets 
and, if  accessible, check and clean the CPU fan. If she uses it while 
it is sitting on a soft surface, the air inlets could be blocked. It 
should be resting on a solid surface while in use.

If available, try "restoring" through XP to a point in time before the 
problem began.

If these do not help and as you discovered, the possible solutions 
become more involved.

I hope I've helped.

Tom

Amado Pino wrote:
> My niece has an Acer 4021 laptop that's driving her, and me, crazy. She'd
> noticed it had become real unstable, freezing up a lot, forcing her to do
> improper shut downs, so she asked me to help her out. First let me give you
> the specs, Windows XP Home with 512MB of system RAM, 3 years old. So I
> started doing some trouble shooting, ran SpinRight 6.0 to rule out hard
> drive issues, passed, knowing this then I tried the recover disks, 3 of
> them, that Acer includes with it, it loads the initial disk ans tells me to
> insert disk number 1, which I do, it spits out telling me to insert the
> correct disk, but I'm inserting the correct disk, so I call Acer tech
> support and give them the error message I'm getting which follows "This
> application failed to start because iertutil.dll was not found.
> Re-installing the application may fix the problem" so I go and download the
> missing file, put it on a flash drive and tried to do so, no dice, can't get
> to windows, explorer.exe is not accessible. Any help from any of you tech
> savy people on this list will be greatly appreciated.
> Amado
>
>              
>
>
>   

                         PCSOFT's List Owner's:
                      Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
                       Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>