tsu said:
ah viruses stuff... i hadn't thought of that. i'll look into it. there's only so much mcaffe & lavasoft can do.
Mcaffe is fairly useless, about the same as norton, cept it is slightly less bloated.
Freezing on opening folders and missing icons can be a number of things.
1. data corruption on the hdd: a disk starting to fail may corrupt random areas, some may be folder contents, or it could just be a particular file, suchas the main executable for the program, which usually has the icon in it.
2. A system level corruption of services that is impacting file access.
3. A bad system infection of malware of some sort that has corrupted files.
4. Bad ram
1 and 4 are fairly easy to figure out. get the diagnostic diskette from the hdd mfg's site and run a full scan if diagnostics. Get a copy of memtest86 on diskette and let it run overnite.
2 is not something most users can fix, and often it is unfixable, especially if ntfs files sytem is getting corrupted.
3. To do a somewhat effective scan, it should be run from safemode, command prompt. I know spybot search and destroy will run in this mode.
For an anti-virus, Anti-Vir will also run in command prompt safemode.
If you are going to try anti-vir, uninstall mcaffe. NEVER EVER run multiple anti-viruses at the same time.
To run either of these in safemod, hit f8 when the bios screen disappears, if not sure, keep hitting it after logo on the inital powerup disappears.
Select safemode command prompt. (or if not willing/able to use commands to get to and run programs, goto plain safemode, at least it has the gui, but in vga mode and no special drives and limited services running)
Go to the install folder and run the program . thought you'd never need to use the command line? well, you do with alot of windows based malware that hooks into the gui.
Booting to plain old safemode is ok, if you really have no confidence in typing commands, but notquite as effective. still better than running in normal mode.
Remove everything spybot finds. same for your anti virus.
