Some Windows Apps Behaving Like Drunken Toy Soldioiars

  • Thread starter Thread starter Brian K
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Brian K

What I mean is anything involving launching a program via the start
menu, some applications via desktop icon, or anything involving Windows
Explorer halt and hesitate like something is wrong with the hard drive,
or some other problem.

I have used "Check It to check my AMD Athlon 64 3700+, RAM, Hard drives,
video, and graphic card test, all have passed. I have run anti-virus,
anti-malware nothing found. Yet when I boot up all runs well until I
wait for my desktop to be populated. There is a good pause of about 10
seconds before the icons, and task bar appear.

Certain applications load and run smoothly. File selection dialogs,
Windows Explorer, and some applications go into "Not Responding" then
after a while they come back to running status.

A week ago my USB HP Photosmart 7760 printer died. I installed a new HP
Photosmart USB printer. No worries at first. All of a sudden it started
giving me Printing failed messages. So I check, eventhough I
uninstalled all the software for the old printer. The icon is still
there in the Printers and Faxes menu. When I try to uninstall it. I get
all sorts of messages stating that the way my system is configured, an
uninstall of the icon is not allowed.

I have full authorization as I am the XP SP3 Administrator on this
machine. So after several attempts of removal, I resort to brute
force. I go through the registry and disable anything that has the old
printer's name on it. Rather then delete a key, or other registry item
I back up the item as a Reg file. Then I rename it with my initials,
".BMK" as an extension. It makes anything I've turned off easy to find.
All I need do is search for .BMK.

Anyhow, whilst I go through the Registry disabling anything with HP
Photosmart 7700 series or HP Photosmart 7760. I find a curious entry in
HKLM\Software\Swearware in the right pane combofix_WOW. It looked
suspicious to me. So I .BMK disabled both the
HKLM\Software\Swearware.BMK and combofix_WOW as BMK_combofix_WOW.

The good news, through painstaking editing of the Registry I removed all
traces of the old printer, HP PHOTOSMART 7760. Feeling good about that,
I went back and deleted all the entries for HP Photosmart 7760 which I
had affixed .BMK.

Since nothing happened negative when I had .BMK the Swearware... I
deleted that too.

I think I may have two problems. One Swearware may actually be some sort
of Microsoft inside joke for something that fixes combo dialog boxes
when they get messed up. And I need to put it back via the .REG file I
created. I still think it's kind of a snarky spyware of malware.

The other problem that I am having I plan to check later today, I think
my hard drive may be having a problem with sticktion. That's where one
spot on the hard drive gets over magnetized and causes one of the drive
heads to get "stuck". It's a harbinger of head crash and hard drive DOA.

Am I on the money with these guestimates of my problem?
 
Check for errors, etc, in Event Viewer. One way to start it:
Start > Run > eventvwr
Click to expand...
Thanks, believe it or not I listened to my primary C: hard drive with a
stethoscope. When loading and performing disk I/O without delays, it
sounded like grains of sand or seeds falling on a slightly resonant
surface. But whenever I got a "not responding" message it made a muffled
Ka-thunk Ka-thunk Ka-thunk. I think that may be the harbinger of
sticktion and eminent hard drive DOA. Luckily, I just ran a backup to my
backup drive.
 
Brian K said:
Thanks, believe it or not I listened to my primary C: hard drive
with a stethoscope. When loading and performing disk I/O without
delays, it sounded like grains of sand or seeds falling on a
slightly resonant surface. But whenever I got a "not responding"
message it made a muffled Ka-thunk Ka-thunk Ka-thunk. I think that
may be the harbinger of sticktion and eminent hard drive DOA.
Luckily, I just ran a backup to my backup drive.
Click to expand...

You can try any one of a number of SMART utilities to check the hard
drive. This one has a free trial that shows a lot of info:
http://hddlife.com/eng/index.html

I doubt that stiction is the problem, that is where a hard drive that
is powered-down will not spin-up because the heads are "stuck" to the
surface. Modern hard drives have been engineered to alleviate that
problem. More likely there are sector read or reallocation issues
(or similar). Regardless, you did the right thing by backing up, and
yes it does sound like the hard drive may need to be replaced very
soon.
 
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