XP bug?

driller

driller

El Presidente
Staff member
I have a friend whose Dell has Windows XP Home OS. A few weeks ago I helped him get rid of a bunch of annoying popups using AdAware and SpyBot and set up spam filtering for his web based email.

Now he calls and has problems getting emails and getting on the internet. I stop by and check it out. No internet explorer, no control panel, no explorer... icons are there, but nothing happens! Go thru msconfig and disable apparent non essentials... still nothing. He has Norton Anti-Virus(up to date), but I do a scan anyways and it comes back clean.

Now it gets weird... I re-install XP using the 'repair' option. All seems to go well. I check it out, and you guessed it, still the same symptoms. What gives?

A boot virus or something? The last 'normal' thing he done on the PC was recieve an email from a work associate that had attached a word document. I suspect a virus but have never seen these symptoms.

There are a few docs and stuff he would hate to loose. I thought of installing a second hard drive as a boot drive and slaving the current drive to keep the records. I've done that with success before.

Short of reformatting and a clean install of XP, what's the options?
 
RE: XP bug?

As a preventative measure on my computer, i have seperate partitions for my operating systems, programs, files, and downloads, with a seperate hard drive specifically for backup. When you get this sorted out, you might consider partitioning it so that if you have to reformat you only have to wipe out the partition with the OS on it, or the partition with the virus on it.

I'd burn whatever docs he wants to CD, or install a spare drive and copy any essentials over to it, then do a clean reformat and install win2k or xp pro. Of course i'm not an expert on these types of things, i tend to get pissed and solve my problems with the computer equivalent of brute force.
 
RE: XP bug?

JP, you have to enable those Icons. This is how you do it...

Right click your mouse on desktop--> Properties--->Desktop (tab)--->Customize Desktop.

Then check all the icons he wants. Don’t know why they disappeared, but by default, they are hidden when windows has been just installed.

Good luck.
 
RE: XP bug?

I didn't think it was possible to run Windows XP without Internet Explorer! That sounds VERY awkward to me and I'm thinking you are gonna have to reformat the HD. I'm thinking it was a virus (blaster maybe?)...

Backup all the important files and reformat. Then get Norton Ghost and make an image of the HD after it is all up and running.

Kale
 
RE: XP bug?

Hit Ctrl + Alt + Del and go into the task mamager and see if any weird applications are running. Then let me know how many process are running. Try to end task as many of them as you can. DO NOT shut explorer.exe off if it is there. Let me know either way on that one. Also you might want to try surfing www.symantec.com and see if they have anything that might be close.

One time I got something similar and it starts to disable all OS features as you use them. So once you open explorer, that was the last time you used that and so on.

Try hijack this, just for a goof? Try to install another browser and see if you can get to your stuff. Maybe even get back to normal. But you did have a great idea to remove the infected drive and install a new drive. You will be faced with a dual boot issue, sometimes you have to edit the boot.ini file to get it to go. Good luck!

edit
I just thought of this - see if you can change the background, find a picture or something and save it as a background, once I saw a virus that made icons invisible - lol!
 
RE: XP bug?

I probably won't get back to it 'till the weekend, but thanks for the tips. BTW, the icons are there(except 'My Computer'). I looked at task manager once or twice and no apps were running, but as far as the processes, most are greek to me anyways, but explorer.exe was there.

My first task is to look for a virus that may have gotten past Norton.

TRS-80s and C-64s were sure a lot simpler!
 
RE: XP bug?

Well, I got it back up and running...

Over 45 processes were running, deleting one by one seemed to do nothing. Command line review of HDD and mem showed nothing abnormal. MSCONFIG showed weird HTML type commands which seemed to come back to life after unchecking?

Re-installed XP in another folder. Re-installed cursory programs, etc... Move documents, cookies and files from old user accounts to new user accounts.

Only downside is dual-boot message at bootup, and a different desktop layout which will take some time for him to get acustomed too. OS, programs, IE, email and everything works now.

Now I just need to change my cell number.:+
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top