Jim said:
Thanks for the response.
That's what I was thinking. I did wipe the hard drive using Partition Magic,
then again with the XP CD. It's a brand new motherboard and hard drive
It's a Seagate had drive, so I got a hold of Seagate Tools and ran full
tests on it. Everything passed. The computer actually belongs to a friend of
mine and I have put his XP on it when I first got him the new motherboard
and everything was fine (that was about a month ago) then about two weeks
ago, he tells me IE keeps crashing when surfing the web. I had a feeling
right away it was either virus or spyware. Ran AdAware and found a ton of
stuff, but problem was still there. Did a system restore, but still there,
so I re-installed Windows. Now I get this problem. Frustrating!
I've been building computers and troubleshooting them for years now and
never ran into any of these problems. LOL.
Thanks again for the info...going to try another hard drive to see if that
fixes it. Seagate hard drive is under warrenty, but not sure if they'll take
it since their tools program says nothing is wrong. LOL.
Jim
Hi, Jim. Just some more thoughts. If the installation CD happens to be a
backup copy, might run antivirus against it. But if I understand correctly,
the sequence was repartition, install, thereafter it got infected and
displays an improper icon (a strong tip-off and one amongst other
annoyances), cleaned infection (with System Restore turned off?), still had
apparent infection residue symptoms, restored (!), still have symptoms.
Perhaps your cleansing sequence was wrong and/or incomplete. For example,
the restore process could have worked except for the normal no access to the
restore folder and insufficient repair of the icon thing, but then got
brought back by the restore process. I'd try these steps in this order...
Download but do not yet install: AVG, ZoneAlarm, Spybot Search & Destroy,
Adaware-6, SpywareGuard, and SpywareBlaster. When downloading, get latest
reference files for Adaware and Spybot, too, for manual updating while
offline.
Physically disconnect from all networking. Turn off System Restore.
Uninstall any existing versions of the above list of programs.
Boot into Safe Mode and use MS Config to go into Diagnostic Mode (do that).
In MS Config, then enable selective startup and then select the options to
start everything except for the Load Startup Items. Go to the Services tab
and select the option to hide all Microsoft stuff, unselect anything that
remains showing.
Reboot normally, tell the MS Config notice upon the boot to not ask again
and click OK (do not click Cancel). Note that only AVG should be used for
now, if you have Nortons or something else - disable it in Services &
Startups as needed or uninstall it, for now.
Install all the above programs, apply the manually obtained updated
reference files, configure them. For Spybot, go into its Advanced mode and
enable both of its "resident" utilities (Tools), also configure it to check
for ActiveX, BHO's, and Browser Pages, but not Hosts file (manually rename
the Hosts file). Via MS Config, note what Services and Startups AVG
installed. Then run AVG, Adaware, Spybot (for Spybot, also do the immunize
thing). Let them try to fix anything at all that they find and suffer all
the security popups from Spybot and SpywareGuard as the registry gets
cleaned. Reboot normally, still with the Selective Startup.
Get the installation XP CD. Go to a cmd box and run these commands:
sfc /purgecache
sfc /scannow
sfc /purgecache
exit
That sfc stuff, above, should replace and guarantee usage of replaced
versions of any modified or corrupted essential system files. Do not do the
sfc stuff if the machine is SP2, I'm not at all sure that would be
compatible.
Right-click the C: drive, Properties, Tools, Check Now button; tell it to do
a thorough check (both options, that includes checking for bad sectors). Let
it reboot. It will take a while, maybe quite a while, to finish. Don't be
impatient, lack of apparent HDD activity does not mean chkdsk has crashed.
After the reboot, in MS Config Services and Startups, turn off (or go
uninstall) AVG if you want to use the original (if any) antivirus utility
and turn back on the original antivirus utility. Reboot.
Your problem should be non-evident at this point. For all the remaining MS
Config shown Services and Startups that are not yet enabled, Google the heck
out of them and of course do not re-enable the suspicious entries, but
re-enable the known good ones.
If you want to clean the Registry of the remaining "bad" startups that are
not enabled, you can search for their related MSCONFIG entries via searching
the registry, export the keys for backup and then delete them. There's a way
to remove services per their registry entries, but I don't have the link on
hand at this writing.
Reboot. Turn back on System Restore. Reconnect the networking, go do all MS
website provided updates (yep).
If you still have problems, now try a Repair re-install from a CD boot onto
your "clean" system, and don't forget to again do the MS updates (they'd be
needed).
That's a shotgun approach, but I bet if fixes things! Check Event Viewer on
a couple of boots and some usage, just to make sure. If XP Pro, go turn on
auditing of all failures in Local Security Policy (Admin Tools from Control
Panel).
