Black Screen Crash Accompanied With Strange Entry in Pfirewall.log

[Guest]

For several weeks I've experienced a black screen crash in which everything is frozen; not able to ctl-alt-del, etc. but I can hold down the power button to turn power off. Then of course I get the check disk screen upon rebooting.

I have the ICF enabled and security logging of dropped packets and successful connections. I examined the pfirewall.log and found UDP dropped packets but when the computer crashes, there's a dump of HTML source code of web pages from websites I visited, some error or warning messages that I had experienced recently are in the dump, and even paths on my C: drive are listed. Also there's some non-readable stuff in the log. It is quite lengthy and occupies the fields that normally show the date,time, action, protocol, src-ip, etc. It's like a mixed up dump or sorts. Another thing about the UDP dumps is that the source IP is mine and the destination IP is a multi cast - It makes me think I have a trojan or worm.

I downloaded Ad-aware and Spybot S&D and got rid of some spyware it detected and it is still crashing with the strange dump in the pfirewall.log.

I've researched the internet using different search engines for something like I'm experiencing but have yet to find anyone experiencing or at least mentioning the accompanying strange pfirewall.log entries after a crash occurs.

I had already updated Windows XP's latest critical security patches; used Microsoft's Blaster detector and it checked out okay.

I'm literally at my wits end. Can someone HELP?

Helen V.

 

[Guest]

Helen V.

I have run into lockup problems before and they can vary from a messed up user profile, to incompatible hardware drivers. You need to consider a problem diagnosis strategy.I would first look to see if all the latest patches are applied to the hardware devices and drivers used by the operating sysstem. I would then recommend creating a temporary user to log on to and attempt to use the same applications to rule out the user as the problem. If the problem still happens under the new user the next step should be to look at the applications you are running and make sure that all the latest patches are applied to the software applications you are using. If there are still problems you might want to consider the system itself due to the fact that hardware can go bad and the temperatures inside the computer case could cause any of the components to overheat.

-Daivd L. Bork (Bork Technical Services