WinXP Software Problem...

  • Thread starter Thread starter Derek
  • Start date Start date
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Derek

Hello, a friend of mine recently installed the Sun Java Webstart software on
his laptop which ended up slowing it down considerably. He uninstalled it
and ever since his laptop has still remained slow and now it also has a few
other problems. I installed Norton Antivirus 2003 on his computer and now
whenever he starts up his computer the virus monitor is shut down
immediately. I try to open Norton but it will only run about 3 seconds and
then shut itself down. I was thinking maybe a virus got installed on his
computer and I went to check 'msconfig' to see if anything is running in the
startup that shouldn't. I opened 'msconfig' and this program will shut
itself down as well after about 3 seconds. So then I went to 'regedit' and
this also shuts itself down after 3 seconds. All other software works just
fine. I tried ending all processes that the system didn't consider critical
and was still having the problem. Finally, I went to the Trendmicro website
and ran their free virus scan on the laptop. It found nothing. So now I'm
not sure what to do. Anyone have any ideas what may be happening???

Thanks
Derek
 
Hello Silent Steel,
do you remember what kind of virus it was? Was it the BugBear virus? I
have been doing a little research and this virus apparently shuts down the
virus detection and firewall programs. It doesn't say anything about
shutting down regedit or msconfig though.

Thanks!
Derek

Silent Steel said:
Had The same problem my self. This is what you do. restart the computer in
Click to expand...
safe mode. Start -- Run -- MSCONFIG. but you have to be quick. select the
boot tab and select /safeboot. Restart your computer. Then go to
http://www.pandasoftware.com/activescan and do a full computer scan. When it
is done and deleted ur virus, just go back into msconfig and remove the
checkmark for the safe boot. Hope this helps.
 
Derek said:
Hello, a friend of mine recently installed the Sun Java Webstart software on
his laptop which ended up slowing it down considerably. He uninstalled it
and ever since his laptop has still remained slow and now it also has a few
other problems. I installed Norton Antivirus 2003 on his computer and now
whenever he starts up his computer the virus monitor is shut down
immediately. I try to open Norton but it will only run about 3 seconds and
then shut itself down. I was thinking maybe a virus got installed on his
computer and I went to check 'msconfig' to see if anything is running in the
startup that shouldn't. I opened 'msconfig' and this program will shut
itself down as well after about 3 seconds. So then I went to 'regedit' and
this also shuts itself down after 3 seconds. All other software works just
fine. I tried ending all processes that the system didn't consider critical
and was still having the problem. Finally, I went to the Trendmicro website
and ran their free virus scan on the laptop. It found nothing. So now I'm
not sure what to do. Anyone have any ideas what may be happening???

Thanks
Derek
Click to expand...

I am not sure about Norton but the msconfig and regedit shutting down seconds
after you run them is a problem that has nothing to do with a virus. It seems
to be a fairly common problem and I am hoping that someone from Microsoft will
eventually come out with a fix for it. A number of people have been commenting
about programs shutting down second after they have been run and the one that
seems to be noticed most often is msconfig.

The problem will even happen on systems that XP has been freshly installed on a
virgin HD straight from the XP disk with nothing installed that isn't straight
from the install disk. Unless Microsoft is now distributing XP with a built-in
virus it isn't being caused by a virus.
 
Hello!
Finally got the problem fixed. I actually did turn out to be a virus. I
couldn't get the virus program or liveupdate for Norton to work so I had to
download and install the definitions off the website. I was then able to
run Norton if I went into Safe Mode. After running it, it found the
Gaobot.gen virus. Apparently this one does shut down the virus program
along with msconfig & regedit. I managed to remove the virus files on the
computer, plus Symantec had a removal tool to download on their website as
well.

Derek
 
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