Taskmanager Doesn't work

[Sriranga MS Dattatreya]

I'm not sure how or why, but I suspect an insiduous
website or popup add.

Task manager no longer works.

I cannot summon it via CTRL-ALT-DEL or Run or even via MS
Help.

Occassionally a ghost of the task manager appears but
disappears very quickly.

I've rebooted my computer and updated Windows XP as far
as it goes.

At present I am unable to close programs that do not
respond nor can I close IE when it goes nutty with popup
ads.

Please help. This is quite scary.

Thank you

 

[Larry Samuels MS-MVP XP \(Shell/User\)]

Info on removing Spybot at:
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.spybot.worm.html

Special thanks go to Doug Knox MS-MVP for the following workaround:

Do the following:

Click Start, Run and enter CMD to open a Command Prompt window.
Then copy and paste the following commands into the Command Prompt window.

COPY %WINDIR%\System32\Taskmgr.exe %WINDIR%\System32\Taskmgr1.exe
COPY %WINDIR%\REGEDIT.EXE %WINDIR%\REGEDIT.COM
COPY %WINDIR%\PCHealth\HelpCtr\Binaries\MSCONFIG.EXE
%WINDIR%\PCHealth\HelpCtr\Binaries\MSCONFIG1.EXE

Then you can use the new file names to get into these utilities to use them
to help your troubleshooting.

--
Larry Samuels MS-MVP (Windows-Shell/User)
Associate Expert
Unofficial FAQ for Windows Server 2003 at
http://home.earthlink.net/~larrysamuels/WS2003FAQ.htm
Expert Zone -