applications quitting by themselves

[Phill Daniel]

My niece has a Dell computer and i believe it was infected with a virus.

my symptoms were the continual return to the DELL POST screen after attempting
a boot from floppy (empty) and the c: drive.

Once i pressed F12 for the DELL boot menu, then i was able to force it to go to
the CDROM drive to attempt to perform diags.

Ultimately, hardware wise the system was ok, but i couldnt boot to windows XP.

Inserted the installation CD, went into the recovery console and performed a
FIXMBR and FIXBOOT without success.

Performed an install (repair) of Win XP and it came up ok.

attempts to start NAV 2004 resulted in the splash screen and nothing else
(except for LUCOMS~1.EXE running in Task manager).

After numerous attempts to deinstall/install NAV 2004 i could not get it up and
running..

During this i decided to check the registry and remove any reference to
SYMANTEC in it... REGEDIT started and within 5-10 seconds it shut itself down
again. This occurred EVERY time.

I also discovered that when i opened the Office 2000 programs, pressing F1 -
the office assistant appeared and then cleared itself, also within 5 seconds.

I am at a loss as to why this is occurring... there are currently no viruses on
the PC - i performed a NAV pre-scan.

I have emptied out the prefetch folder and also performed a chkdsk - no issues.

one other thing i discovered a lot of DESKTOP.INI files in places where they
should not be. (start menu / programs / startup - each and every user).

Can anyone offer any feedback about this, i am trying to avoid the need to
perform a clean install of WINXP !!

If replying privately, plse remove _nospam_ from my email address.

Rgds
Phill Daniel.

 

[DL]

If you ran the nav pre scan using the cd the virus deffs contained will not
be current, and could in fact be quite old.
If you can connect, and have the firewall enabled, you can run an online
scan via www.symantec.com / security response.
There is also info on symantec site re how to completely remove; if there
was a failed installation you likely will have to do this prior to
attempting a clean install.

 

[Phill Daniel]

If you ran the nav pre scan using the cd the virus deffs contained will not
be current, and could in fact be quite old.
If you can connect, and have the firewall enabled, you can run an online
scan via www.symantec.com / security response.
There is also info on symantec site re how to completely remove; if there
was a failed installation you likely will have to do this prior to
attempting a clean install.

thanx for that "DL".

1) i went to the website, ran the checker, discovered the gaobot worm.
2) downloaded the removal tool, and fixed it.
3) rebooted the PC... same problem with application shutting down again.
4) checked taskmanager, and the removal tool HAD not removed the task
"msnmsgr.exe" from the system32 folder.
5) tried to end the process - no luck.
6) tried to delete the file - no luck
7) rebooted using windows install CD, went into the recovery console and
deleted msnmsgr.exe successfully.
8) rebooted PC and all is ok. assistant doesnt quit, regedit doesnt quit.
successfully installed NAV2004 - updated all ok.

have posted this here just in case anyone else has similar problems.

Rgds
Phill..

 

[roger]

Hi Phill,

http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_emerutils.htm
Creates usable copies of REGEDIT, MSCONFIG and Task Manager




Good luck