DSL Connection Crawls to Halt After 10 mins

[Chris]

After boot-up and DSL connection, IE6 and Outlook work fine.

Another 10 minutes, I can't get mail or goto homepage, but the DSL
connection is enabled.
In fact, IE6 won't launch at all.
I checked processes and memory/processor usage and nothing out of
ordinary.
McAfee didn't find anything except usual Adware junk and quarantined
it.

This has been happeneding for 10 days. I have to restart to get another
10 minutes of net use.

Any idears?

Chris

 

[Guest]

Several things.

Back up your user files (Word, Excel, etc.) to CD or DVD before trying to
fix your computer!

Do you have the latest Windows and IE SPs and patches loaded? Do that
first. Probably can't do much in 10 minutes but try.

Just a virus checker covers less than half the problem on the 'net. Sounds
like you might have registry problems.

Get a registry fixer. I use Norton SystemWorks but that's a 100 bucks. See
if there is shareware from download.com. (Read the reviews!)

Get a software firewall. The one that comes with Windows is not good
enough. It only blocks incoming bad-ware or mal-ware. Your PC can send
mal-ware and you won't even know it. Especially if you were hijacked or got
a key logger installed on your PC. Again, try download.com and read the
reviews there.

Next. Get "Ad-aware" from lavasoft.com, it's free.

Next: Get Spybot from http://www.safer-networking.org, it's free.

See if any of that helps! Just do a good backup of your files first!

 

[Jon Kennedy]

First, totally delete your History and Temporary Internet Files folders:
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/delcache.htm

If no joy....

This may be caused by spyware/malware that's gotten installed on
your system. Use Ad-Aware, Windows Defender and/or Spybot Search & Destroy
to remove it.

Windows Defender (beta)
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx
Ad-Aware: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/
Spybot: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
Good sites on how to install and use Spybot -
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/tutorial/index.html
http://tomcoyote.com/SPYBOT/index1.php

Also download a winsock repair tool, to have just in case cleaning up
anything found breaks it -

Winsock repair tools:
LSPFix- all versions of Windows http://www.cexx.org/lspfix.zip
Winsock2 Fix- Win98, ME
http://www.bu.edu/pcsc/internetaccess/winsock2fix.html
LavaSoft- all versions of Windows-
http://digital-solutions.co.uk/lavasoft/whndnfix.zip

More information here:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/
http://inetexplorer.mvps.org/tshoot.html
http://spywarewarrior.com/sww-help.htm

If no joy, in IE go to Tools...Internet Options...Advanced tab, Browsing
section, uncheck "Enable third-party browser extensions", click Apply, click
Okay, reboot. If that solves your problem, then more troubleshooting is
needed to find out exactly which program, or Browser Helper Object (BHO) is
causing this problem. You don't want to leave it at that, as some BHOs are
useful or necessary - like Adobe Acrobat for reading .pdf files or an
essential component of Norton AV. Get BHODemon -
http://www.definitivesolutions.com/bhodemon.htm - read all about BHOs.
Disable all items, and then gradually replace one or two at a time to narrow
down the culprit.

Or if you have IE 6 SP-2 you can do this within the browser:
How to manage Internet Explorer add-ons in Windows XP Service Pack 2
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;883256

If all the above fails, then the problem could be something new that the
spyware cleaners above don't have in their databases yet. In that case....
HijackThis direct download:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/files/hijackthis.zip
Tutorial on how to use HijackThis:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/htlogtutorial.html
Then post it's output log to the forum here for analysis and feedback by the
parasite experts:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/forums/
Or the other HijackThis Logs forums listed here:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/forums.html

Or try this program to get some of the most nasty malware:
CWShredder direct download:
http://aumha.org/downloads/cwshredder.zip

An alternate resource for all of this and more:
http://www.aumha.org/secure.htm

 

[Chris]

Installing SP2 and MS Defender did the trick. I got a "end program:
trickler" message
so I guess that nasty thing was booted.

Am getting Norton SystemWorks today.

Thank you Rick and Jon!!