Puzzling Behavior - Programs Shutting Down Independently

[Guest]

I have a friend running XP Home SP1a on an Athlon XP 1600 system, 256 mB RAM. When he opens a program that came with the OS, such as Hearts, Display Properties, etc the program loads up then shuts down by itslef within a second or two. Other programs installed like Office, SBC Yahoo DSL Browser, etc run fine. They don't shut down by themselves. The only thing I can think of is the PC2700 DDR Ram that I installed is 266mHz RAM. The FSB for the CPU is 100mHz. Could this be an issue with the speed difference? Do I need to run a repair install?

 

[Rich Barry]

Stephen, he may have a virus. You can use these sites to check
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

http://safespy.net/Spyware_Hunter.htm

http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/


http://www.safer-networking.org/index.php?lang=en&page=knowledgebase/threats

http://spybot-spyware.com/trojan.htm

I have a friend running XP Home SP1a on an Athlon XP 1600 system, 256 mB

RAM. When he opens a program that came with the OS, such as Hearts, Display
Properties, etc the program loads up then shuts down by itslef within a
second or two. Other programs installed like Office, SBC Yahoo DSL Browser,
etc run fine. They don't shut down by themselves. The only thing I can think
of is the PC2700 DDR Ram that I installed is 266mHz RAM. The FSB for the CPU
is 100mHz. Could this be an issue with the speed difference? Do I need to
run a repair install?

 

[Guest]

It sounds a lot more like software than hardware to me. Just because a program is part of the OS is no guarantee it is good. When an "exception" (bad code) is encountered it can hang, reboot or shut down. I thing you should either replace the offending program or not run it.