Recommendation on strangely behaving Win2000

  • Thread starter Thread starter Saga
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Saga

I have a PC with Win 2000 installed and have been using it for about 2 1/2
years
without problems, but lately, it has been behaving somewhat strange, and by
strange
I mean "unpredictable":

- Sometimes is doesn't boot. It loads, then when the Win splash screen goes
away
and is replaced by the blue screen, just before the logon, it stops and
simply
stays there. The mouse pointer is visible and responds, but Ctrl-Alt-Del
does not.

- Sometimes it does that same as above, except that there is a lot of hard
drive
activity. The same access rithym repeats itself.

- Sometimes it boots into Windows and a message comes up stating that an
entry
point for mcvcrt.dll (may have misspelled the name) cannot be found for
BCF.EXE.
BCF is, I believe, some sort of adware "Broadjump Client Foundation".

- Sometimes it boot into Windows, but it displays the message "Error in
cdfs.sys". I
assume this is the CD driver. And no, I can't access the CD drive when
this happens.

- Sometimes it boots with a 16 color scheme, when I have it configured for
24 bit
color.

- Sometimes it boot fine, but when I double click on My Computer or My
Network Places,
a message comes up stating that an error occurred in IExplore and that
the application
is shutting down.

And sometimes it boots fine, without any problems and can be used normally.

This PC has:

- Two Ethernet cards, one for local LAN, one for DSL modem.
- DSL s/w, although I left the DSL service area, so the service is no longer
used. I have
the local LAN card connected, but the DSL Ethernet card is not connected
to anything,
- I have a CD RW, with CD Easy creator s/w.
- I have SP1 installed.
- Video was not important, so I got a cheap SiS card.
- 324MB RAM, 1Ghz AMD Athlon, 40 GB HD, SOYO motherboard

I am kind of "sure" that the DSL software installed the BCF stuff. I say
kind of because I
also got some cheap CD (medical library, home improvements and a dictionary)
and can't
rule out the possibility that one of these could have installed it.

Thanks for looking and any recommendations are welcomed.

Saga
 
Not recently (blushing)

I didn't suspect a virus... I have to admit, but I will do so ASAP!

Thanks!
Saga
 
In addition to John's suggestion, you might make sure all internal cable
connections, mainboard & HDD jumpers, and RAM & peripheral cards are
solidly seated. Sounds like you moved & something might be a bit loose.
And keep in mind that hardware does fail, sometimes slowly and
intermittently. Do backups, do chkdsks, run HDD diagnostics, etc. And
consider whether you installed any hardware or software around the time
this behavior began....
 
I will check this out. I had some troubke with the CDRW and after a hefty
amount of swapping, I found that the IDE cable had problems. I replaced
it and all seem to work fine, but this was almost a year before these new
problems started. I do think that it could be the mal/spy-ware that sgopus
mentioned, as I did install some cheap programs and I suspect that they
could have done more harm than do.

I also ran Symantec's WinDoc and that gave me numerous errors in
the registry. I will repair these, but not before backing everything up.

Thanks all for your responses.
Saga
 
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