WinXP problem, could use some help

[AKS\/\/ulfe]

I use Win98 on my box, but my dad uses WinXP on his notebook. I drove up to his place today to check it out because I'm the computer person in the family.

Its the wierdest damn thing, and I've had it happen before on my machine - problem was a corrupted program that would load up with internet explorer. But, I removed all programs that should load with internet explorer and had no luck.

Here's whats going on - in the normal boot up under the "Owner" profile (only profile under normal boot up) - internet explorer will not open. Clicking it will start to load it, but it just dies. Using task manager, you can see iexplorer.exe briefly pop up then it goes away. Clicking on My Computer, going to Control Panel, or trying to use the "Find files or folders..." shortcuts causes the taskbar and all icons to disappear while there is some disc activity then re-appear. I've closed out all non-vital entries in the taskmanager section one by one to locate the problem until I was down to the bare bones required to run XP - and nothing helped.

In safe mode, they all open up fine - so I'm thinking there must be something loading in the normal boot up that is causing the load up for anything related to internet explorer (since its integrated with anything thats system browsing) to halt it. There are no error messages at all, I just can't get it to run.

I ran a virus scan through McAfee, with updated virus tables, and it found nothing. I also ran scandisk, and it didn't fix anything.

My WinXP disc is over at someone's house, so I'd have to go for a drive to get it - does anyone have any ideas for getting this up and running? I also did a system restore from a point that was a month ago (this started in the past week and a half), and that didn't help.

Thanks for any help.
-SW

[bloom25]

If you can, try creating a new user and see if that works.  Obviously, Internet Explorer (which is used as the file browser in Win98 and up btw) is not starting properly.  I'm thinking possibly the "owner" profile is corrupted.

If the new profile (which should have administrative rights) works, make 2 more admin profiles and do this ( http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;811151 ) to copy the old Owner profile settings (i.e. start menu settings and documents) to the new profile.  Once that is done, you can either disable or remove the unused profiles.

[AKS\/\/ulfe]

Great idea, thanks Bloom! I'll give that a shot tommorrow.
-SW

[bloom25]

AKSwulfe, I added the link to Microsoft's site to enable you to move the profile's settings over.  (Hopefully without reintroducing the problem...)

[AKS\/\/ulfe]

Cool, thanks for the information. I'll let ya know how it turns out. I'll only transfer the necessary settings over that can't be rebuilt, but try to rebuild as much as possible from scratch.
-SW

[AKS\/\/ulfe]

I tried creating a new profile, but that didn't work. Same problem. I tried messing with the graphics settings just in case, since it worked in safe mode I figured - why not, but that failed.

I did notice one thing though, this system only has 256MB and only has around 80MB max free in normal mode. I calculated all of the running processes and there is about 50MB worth that is unaccounted for. Does WinXP not show its shell process? Thats the only thing that could account for that memory that is not available.

And does internet explorer/mycomputer/browsing capabilities not work when the system only has that much free memory available? I wouldn't think it would, but WinXP isn't something I've used much - except at work where I had 768MB of memory.

I'm completely stumped here, aside from reinstalling XP (and convincing my dad to purchase another 256MB of notebook memory for all of his background processes).

Its really wierd, I've never seen something like this - removing all external programs that load up usually fixes it and then I could narrow it down to the individual program, especially when it works fine in safe mode.

If you have any other ideas, I'd appreciate it. I'll keep messing around with it, see if I can find anything.

Thanks.
-SW

[sonar732]

Try reinstalling Internet Explorer.

[sb1086]

Try defraging the HDD, when you ran scandisk did you set it to recover data from damaged sectors?

Also try uniinstalling IE and reinstalling it, it could also be the user profile on the machine itself, try making a guest profile and see if that works, if a guest profile works, then delete the owner profile run regclean, and make a new owner profile.

XP's a funny animal, looks kinda like 98 operates kinda like 98, and even though most of the stuff looks the same its different than 98.

[Shane]

another person on a different site had a similar problem.... here's what he wrote about it:

Look2me, though, is especially pernicious. It seems that it runs as a shell extension, reinstalling itself every time you go to delete it; it also removes Windows Explorer from the Task Manager menu, preventing you from closing Explorer to delete L2M. Fortunatley, I found a program called Kill2Me, which interrupted Explorer, deleed L2M, and everything is jake now.


http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/spyware.look2me.html

http://www.pchell.com/support/look2me.shtml

hope this helps.

[Siaf__csf]

A clean WinXP takes about 80Mb of ram to run. So if you're using anything above that it's major cleanup time.

You could (and probably will) have several spywares and viral programs running.

[AKS\/\/ulfe]

I went ahead and re-imaged it, it just wasn't worth the hassle of cleaning up and getting back to normal.

Thanks for the tips though guys, if it happens again (and its bound too) I'll check out your advice Steve.
-SW

[Siaf__csf]

Hey did I already tell to install W2k instead? Much less problems