Belly up? compaq presario

[Oldguy]

My boss wanted me to look at his kid's laptop (Compaq presario AMD Turion/xp pro/amd 200m graphic) that mysteriously failed after an internet music download session.

In boot sequence, windows opens to desk top for 5-10 seconds, flashes on and off a few times then disappears with only the wallpaper remaining. I have tried the recovery disk to no avail - a number of faults occur when reinstalling some of the drivers, java and other bundled apps. Have tried to just install drivers and os from the recovery disk. No help. Starts in safe mode. but I could locate no obvious problems in device manager. Restore points non-existent. ran checkdisk from command prompt in safe - no help

Only possibility I can think of is that some sort of malware was installed
and the solution is a clean install of windows + drivers. PITA but I said I would try to help. Any

Any thoughts/help would be greatly apprecaited.

 

[killernotebooks]

In safe mode check:
:arrow: c:\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp\ for scumware startups
:arrow: Go to START|run type SYSEDIT in the WIN.ini file look for the same thing under "load" or "run" format will look something like this: load ="C:\Windows\System32\viri.exe"
:arrow: Go to START|RUN type REGEDIT go to key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
You can hit F3 and a search box will come up and you can search for RUNSERVICES which is like 3 keys down from RUN if you don't want to crawl through manually.
:idea: This is more than likely where your malware, spyware, viri etc. is hiding. It may do the trick.

If he was downloading "music" he was probably either downloading *porn* or using a sharing service like LimeWire which is crawling with fake virus files.

 

[Oldguy]

If he was downloading "music" he was probably either downloading *porn* or using a sharing service like LimeWire which is crawling with fake virus files.[/quote]

Limewire it was located almost everything but still "feels" a little hinky, the restore disk still errored out on the included antivirus install and a few registry items did not look right so rather than fool around I did a clean xp install followed by restoring the compaq drivers and it runs again. Dude lost his music files, but not my problem since thats what caused the crash in the first place.

Thank you very much for your help!!

 

[killernotebooks]

Tell him that when he sees files less than 1 MB to automatically think, "These aren't music". Like 750 kn 775 kb, 128kb, 256kb. Viri and malware trying to spoil the FREE everything revolution!

 

[asusman]

I've been seeing a new thing where some fake IE apps install and forward your homepage to some antivirus site.

When you go to uninstall them it warns you that you'll have to reboot.
Don't click yes as it dumps a virus and then quick reboots. Hit cancel and it uninstalls.

 

[killernotebooks]

Isn't that sweet?
How freaking hard is it to track this stuff down?
Answer: Not hard at all... if they wanted to, but too much money is being made off it.

If there was some real penaties for doing it like they chop your freaking two little fingers off, then the stuff would stop.

 

[JasumX]

The funny thing is that most viruses and things of that sort that come out these days are just reverse engineered Microsoft patches. What easier way to find security flaws than to let Microsoft do it for you? And the reason that they get spread is that people don't install the patches right away. That probably wasn't the case here, but it's definitely happening.