Viurs? XP - Unsusual beheaviour...Please help

[Hugo B]

Hi everyone,

My problem is my xp sp2 machine was rebooted and now, right before the
desktop starts loading, it freezes and it cannot start loading tray icons.
Then it restarts explorer.exe and does this over and over not allowing me to
even navigate or troubleshoot.

I have managed to get the task manager up, but no apps are running, except
eplorer as a process, but restarts repeattedly as mentioned above.

I have not installed any apps lately, except photoshop plug-in for
auto-hiding menus and seems to be working fine.

I've also asked those who have used my pc and they haven't opened
attachments or installed anything either.

I have an aupdated version of McAfee anti virus and xp firewall enabled.

Does anybody have an idea as to what this might be?

Please let me know what other criteria i should provide to help diagnose
this issue.

Thanx in advance.

 

[GSV Three Minds in a Can]

Hi everyone,

My problem is my xp sp2 machine was rebooted and now, right before the
desktop starts loading, it freezes and it cannot start loading tray icons.
Then it restarts explorer.exe and does this over and over not allowing me to
even navigate or troubleshoot.

I have managed to get the task manager up, but no apps are running, except
eplorer as a process, but restarts repeattedly as mentioned above.

I have not installed any apps lately, except photoshop plug-in for
auto-hiding menus and seems to be working fine.

I've also asked those who have used my pc and they haven't opened
attachments or installed anything either.

I have an aupdated version of McAfee anti virus and xp firewall enabled.

Does anybody have an idea as to what this might be?

Sounds like a rogue service(*) of some kind. Can you 'start run
msconfig' and look at the services tab, and sort by manufacturer (the MS
ones are less likely to be a problem).

Will the machine boot in safe mode (or safe mode with networking, if you
are on a network)? (In that mode many services, and quite a lot of
drivers, are not loaded).

(*) I say that because a) you won't see them with task manager, and b)
the point at which you say it does is just when most of the services
will be being intialized.