Worm? Virus? Unexplained crashes in windows/browser/apps - help :P

[Tac]

Since its not AH-related i'm posting this here.

March 31 my IE and Firefox starting crashing with errors that 'Firefox (or IE) has encountered an error and needs to shut down' message.

Now, I do not have autoupdates on in either browser nor did I install anything new or did anything different on my machine. In fact all I had done for the past month was play one online game and visit a couple of websites (this one included).

Then my online game also started crashing with the same error.

Ran antivirus and ad-aware..they found nothing. I ran a registry tool on check-mode only and it claims there's like 1000+ errors but I dont trust the tool and I don't think that would be the issue.

Any ideas? Recomendations of any free antivirus or tools I could use?

- I used the tool to check for the conficker worm and it said I was clean

This is getting annoying.

[WilldCrd]

First off, what version of windows are you using? XP? pro or home? vista? what version ect.
2nd if you dont trust your reg check tool then why use it? its a wasted step and wasted time.
3rd manually update you windows os. hopefully its a lgit copy. once you do that see if that fixes your issue. if not then get back to us

[Vulcan]

Get mem386 (or the Ultimate Boot CD with it on it) and test your RAM.

[Cthulhu]

First off, what version of windows are you using? XP? pro or home? vista? what version ect.
2nd if you dont trust your reg check tool then why use it? its a wasted step and wasted time.
3rd manually update you windows os. hopefully its a lgit copy. once you do that see if that fixes your issue. if not then get back to us

Also, if it's XP, which Service Pack? (SP3 did cause some initial problems. MMC, etc.))

Can you reproduce the error in Safe-Mode using the browser(s)?

You might also consider going into MSConfig and try selectively disabling startup items. It might help you to identify the root cause.


There's nothing wrong with him running his Reg tool to possibly identify suspect keys, he's just leery of letting it clean up for him.

[Motherland]

I've been having the same problems, since April 1st. Haven't found a fix to it yet. I'm running XP SP2.
I found a thread on google about it, and I've been following it. There's a bunch of people who had the same problem crop up in the past 5 days or so. I would guess it's a new virus.
http://www.overclock.net/intel-cpus/486062-windows-xp-freezes-1-continuous-beep-4.html
AVG and Malwarebytes didn't find anything. I can connect to all the antivirus sites so it's probably not the conficker worm.
This seems to becoming common, hopefully someone will find a fix for it soon.

[Tac]

Exactly motherland. Thats exactly what happened to me. Last day of march and april 1 is when all this crap started. However, unlike the thread you linked to, I do not get motherboard beeps or system slowdowns.. it all runs fine then all the sudden its the WTF program has encountered an error message and closes down whatever application im running.

I run WinXP64 Pro service pack 2

I've done selective startup with everything disabled. It still happens.

Very sure its some kind of virus and not some windows error or corrupt file... this all happened one day to another without me installing or removing any software at all...and so many others having the same problem from the same date tells you something.

[Fulmar]

Exactly why I never spend much time trying to mess around with a machine that is infected.  Always do regular backups (and have multiple sources, cd/dvd, web, external hd, etc).

Nothing beats a good ole format.  The amount of time you spend trying to fix your problem (and amount of frustration) can easily surpass the amount of time it takes to back up your existing data and do a format/reinstall.

[Motherland]

I've been screwing around, did a backup from a while ago, same thing kept happening. I just ended up reformatting. Works fine now !