Vista does not seem to completely log in ... (??)

S

Simon McDonald

My son has a Dell Inspiron 1525, running VISTA Home Premium SP1.

When he logs in visually it looks fine except that:

The OneCare icon in the systray is missing and eventually a message box is
displayed stating 'that a service OneCare required is not started - try a
restart'.
The Local Area Connection icon in sys tray for the network card shows as
'unplugged' (red cross present), but the cable is in and internet access is
available through IE and Messenger works

Other strange things include:

His side/widget bar is there, but totally empty.

If he opens the 'Network Connections' window, it opens showing NO
connections (there should be two - one wired and one wireless), and shows
'Not responding' at the top of the window it is clicked (as if it is trying
hard to supply the detail of the connections but is struggling?).

He normally has UAC switched on, and if he does anything the requires the
UAC prompt to be answered, the prompt never shows up.
For instance, in Task Manager if he clicks the box to show process for all
users, he should get the prompt but it does not show. In this case, he can
still see Task Manager monitoring CPU etc, but the window itself in not
accessible (i.e. when he clicks the window he gets the 'boing' sound similar
to that you get when you click a main window 'under' windows it has
started). It is as if it has gone to do the UAC stuff, but it is taking a
long time (forever!) to do it.
When he right-clicks My Computer and select 'Manage' nothing (appears to)
happen; When he tries to run msconfig, nothing appears to happen;Tries to
get to 'Services' from msconfig;...

Eventually, when trying to do a number of things that require the UAC
prompt, the PC Hangs - but without seeming to be swallowing CPU, just
stopped.

Word seems to work fine.

He says that there seem to be quite a few less processing showing in Task
Manager (but that could be because he normally see all processes from all
users? - which he can not do at the moment).

He says that he has not installed anything recently and as far can not
recall anything 'odd' or different happening.

I do not wish to lead anyone down any particular route, but it seems that
anything that requires to use/go through UAC has the problem.

If anyone has any suggestions as to what to look at or investigate that
would be really useful, I am stumped, especially as most things I would
suggest would require UAC!!

Thanks

Simon
 
R

Rick Rogers

Hi,

Obviously something is interfering, and I would guess that whatever it may
be is trying to circumvent elevation and causing everything to hang. Likely
some sort of malware. Have you tried logging into this account in safe mode?
I'm betting that the problem doesn't exist there. I'd use tools like
autoruns and hijackthis to start going through what's in the startup axis.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx
http://www.download.com/HijackThis/3000-8022_4-10379544.html

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com
 
S

Simon McDonald

Rick,

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, what you say makes sense and could well
be the case.
I will get him to try these things out so that we can see what is going on
at start-up.

I will let you know how it goes.

Thanks again for getting back on such a vague post.

Simon
 

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