Dear all,
Since Saturday, I’ve run into a problem probably the same as the one described in
windows xp screen freezes
However, as I believe it was eventually thought to have stemmed from a piece of hardware which I do not possess nor have ever possessed, I guess it is permissible to make a new thread. I've put the thread in this section of the forum as I have no idea whether I'm dealing with a windows-error or with a virus/trojan/thingy.
The good:
My computer, which serves also as router, boots perfectly fine, and everything works at it should, without strange delays or error messages. I experience no trouble with hardware or with any software that worked fine previously.
The bad:
After some time, ranging from an hour or four down to three quarters of an hour, she freezes, and the only way to end the freeze is a hard reset. What is running keeps on running, but it is impossible to make any changes or start up anything new; this includes being unable to open taskmanager, so I have no clue whether there are some unknown files running rampant or not. I guess it is in effect only explorer that totally freezes (seeing as I’m able to right click on the screen, but not on the taskbar, where no changes at all take place anymore), and maybe I AM able to open anything, but just unable to see it. As that which is still possible takes an enormous amount of time to react, it looks almost as if, somehow, a full 100% CPU is used (though I have no means to see whether that’s actually the case).
Also, though this seems to be a much older problem that probably has little to do with all this, system restore fails to initialize properly after I boot. I do know that a while ago (last year, even) I switched it temporarily off to deal with some worm, but as far as I can tell, it should be switched back on right now.
The ugly:
I found nothing new in either my taskmanager or my registry that might point to a worm or virus.
All scans have mostly come up empty:
- Ad-aware found nothing at all;
- Ewido destroyed a couple of really old cookies, but that’s it;
- Avast! found only the pskavs.dll file associated with Panda (there might be a typo there: I checked the name of the file found and it was the Panda-file) and, for some strange reason, an agobot-infected windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts that had caused no problem before I ran Avast! yet started to act funny immediately afterwards (suddenly I had no access to phobos e.a.). It seems I did get rid of that one, but that didn’t help with my problem.
- Even simply seeing whether Chkdsk or the Microsoft Malware Removal Tool found nothing.
It doesn’t seem to be a problem of memory either, as a general clean-up of my harddisk did nothing at all to improve performance. B.t.w.: I’ve got rid of all my cookies since the last scan, as almost anything found by the scans were tracking cookies. Predictably, this has had no results at all.
The simply weird:
- Somehow, I have to wait until my user profile is fully logged-in before any of the computers on my network have access to the internet, whereas before this problem it was enough just to switch it on.
- The problem seems to have a general dislike of Panda: though the scan works fine (with, again, some spyware found in my cookies, but nowhere else), the freezing problem kicks in the moment I try to view the log. I’m therefore unable to post any Panda-scan.
I’m hoping you will be able to help me out with this one, as I’m completely in the dark as to what might be wrong (which is altogether even more unpleasant than knowing which bug it is that bugs you). My Akiko is by now almost six years old, and I was thinking of getting a new computer somewhere this year: this means she doesn’t have to be all shiny and new, and I’m perfectly happy if just some bandages could be used to get her working properly again until the new computer arrives.
Below I’ll post I Hijackthis-log, hoping that something might turn up there that might help somewhat.
Thanks in advance!
p.s.: Feel free to move this thread when thoughts arise that this might be the result of a virus/trojan/thingy.
