Snap-in creation failed: Group Policy

I don't know why, but this afternoon when I tried to open my Windows XP group policy editor, it was broken. "Snap-in creation failed" it told me. I Googled around. There's a simple fix. It requires the Windows XP install CD. This I have. It requires a CD-ROM drive in which to place the CD. This I don't have.

The spirits of coincidence had slated me to be ferrying my XP disc back and forth from work recently because I've spent this week creating an easy-to-use XP install CD with SP2 slipstreamed into it. On Thursday afternoon, I actually said to myself "I could leave all of my XP CDs here. I've never needed them at home before. I'm sure nothing cataclysmic will happen on my day off." But I know the spirits well. And I knew that as soon as I'd made the decision to leave everything XP-related on my desk, they would conspire to roast my PC at home, or set it to munching random parts of its root partition, or something equally devastating.

So the XP CD went into my bag, which I keep with me always. There's nothing wrong with expecting the worse. I'm used to it by now. But who the heck keeps a CD-ROM drive around?

I toyed with the idea of borrowing a CD-RW drive from work and putting it in my home machine to burn various interesting ISOs. After it was in, it occurred to me that my meager home bandwidth is no match for the 700 MB files that I'd be needing first. So the CD-RW drive came out and I took it back to work. But there was a big, drive-shaped hole in the front of my machine. Yeah, I owned a CD-ROM drive. But clipping those little plastic rails on each side of it is such a pain. And that little black clippy thing that plugs into the sound card? That thing is a whore. "More trouble than it's worth," I concluded. The last time I used it was to install Doom 2. That's 2 as in "two", the last Doom game that didn't bathe you in endless darkness. Call me nostalgic if you wish; I just love the double-barreled shotgun.

So a brief surgery later, losing whatever awesome uptime I may have had until then, I have a CD drive again. SP2 breaks Windows Explorer's ability to update the names of compact discs. You have to manually explore the drive to assure that XP can read it.

Once that's taken care of, you can actually fix the problem that started it all, a broken gpedit. With the XP install disc inserted, open a command-prompt, change to the "I386" directory of the CD, and type this:

D:\I386> expand framedyn.dl_ %systemroot%\system32\framedyn.dll

Problem solved. Why did it break in the first place? Who knows?