odd start menu behaviour

[Guest]

hi,

recently I started to expirience an utterly strange behaviour of the start
menu, neither be reproducable nor consitent in its pattern. It could start
troubling when cascading the menu, randomly items and/or cascading level
would not open, instead producing a ping sound. sometimes the 'program'
cascade would be even empty. sometimes it would recover to a stable status,
most of times however ending up that the 'start' button would turn dead, i.e.
no reaction by clicking on it

Logging off/on would resolve the matter. Hence it seems that somehow the
shell gets screwed, yet i have no clue of what is happening. Several scans by
different applications did not produce any malicious software entry. I also
tried SFC, just to make sure, still it did not make it go away.

Thus, ideas and suggestions welcome. Is there any sort of internet attack
being capable of causing this kind of havoc? I am about to go nuts...

Here are my system specs

operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2
(2600.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519)
Processor: Genuine Intel(R) CPU T2500 @ 2.00GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 2046MB RAM

 

[Stubbo_of_Oz]

hi,

recently I started to expirience an utterly strange behaviour of the start
menu, neither be reproducable nor consitent in its pattern. It could start
troubling when cascading the menu, randomly items and/or cascading level
would not open, instead producing a ping sound. sometimes the 'program'
cascade would be even empty. sometimes it would recover to a stable status,
most of times however ending up that the 'start' button would turn dead, i.e.
no reaction by clicking on it

Logging off/on would resolve the matter. Hence it seems that somehow the
shell gets screwed, yet i have no clue of what is happening. Several scans by
different applications did not produce any malicious software entry. I also
tried SFC, just to make sure, still it did not make it go away.

Thus, ideas and suggestions welcome. Is there any sort of internet attack
being capable of causing this kind of havoc? I am about to go nuts...

Maybe you could try a system restore to a date before the problem
started.

 

[Guest]

thanks indeed for the input, but that does not solve the issue as I am not
sure which date it started excatly and what I have changed since then.

 

[Guest]

The only steady thing in this seems the environment, the havoc happens only
when being connected to the internet, either without firewall or soft coded
firewall on public DHCP WLAN, not behind a hard coded firewall thouh through
wired LAN...

Thus wondering whether there could be any kind of malicious attack producing
this sort of shell behaviour or could there be any type of broadcast, e.g.
dhcp, causing the trouble?