color inverted icon? (and other problems)

[Scott Shannon]

Hi. About 2 weeks ago my win2000 'puter started acting very strange...it
appeared I had a virus, yet I run 24/7 Norton Virus and Norton IS. Explorer
started ignoring clicked links, Norton itself was behaving badly (I couldn't
get the clickdown list of log files in NIS!), and then start/search/files
and folders stopped working! So I gave up and reinstalled win2000 as an
upgrade (didn't want to lose my files). I've also upgraded to servicepack 4
and got all other MS fixes.

Since then it's behaved much better, but there are still some problems that
maybe someone has a suggestion on. Firstly, Outlook express seems to crash
sometimes (I have two accounts running, one on my lan and one over a vpn).
And sometimes when it crashes DrWaston32 also crashes! When that happens I
have to reboot as I can't kill it off with task-manager. Outlook express
also hangs when I used MSN Messenger..even when I tell it NOT to load
messenger at startup. It hangs and keeps hanging until I start
messenger...the only solution was to totally dis-install messenger. And
thirdly (this is weird), when I reboot I always seem to get ONE icon which
has inverted colors...like Adobe icon is green on white (not red on black).
Sometimes my ethereral icon is white on black (not black on white) etc. What
on Earth would cause just one icon to have inverted color?

I don't remember it having these problems before I reinstalled Win2k, i.e.
before the other really bad things started happening. I've scanned for
viruses etc. with the latest Norton list, but it's never found anything.
Could it be something else got currupted which can only be fixed with a
total reinstall (whiping my files)? Thanks for any suggestions/help!

Scott S.

 

[R Green -WoWsat.com]

Scott!

I don't think people say it often enough in this newsgroup. DO NOT INSTALL
AN OS USING "UPGRADE"...
There are often problems that will creep up due to some program file not
running seamlessly with the upgraded ones...

I'd say that you should just bite the bullet and lose some of your programs
for which you did not have a backup CD install for. You should be able to
backup files that you deem to be important for you though.

Get a full install of win2k and you'll thank yourself for it! I've been
running win2k pro full install version for several years now and except for
the stupid patching that I have to do every two months or so (forcing me to
reboot), the machine has been a workhorse and has been running 24/7 without
fail.

Win2k is the best OS written by MS by far... bar none.

R Green
Technical Support