A couple of weeks ago I downloaded latest windows update and rebooted as instructed. Only the PC kept rebooting itself continuously. When I stopped it with F8 and set it not to restart on errors I got a critical windows error message.

I reformatted drive and reinstalled windows, all was fine for a couple of days, then here is the really wierd thing.

I heard the fan spinning but neither I nor the wife had turned the PC on. I once again found it rebooting itself in a continuous loop.

Seems it turned itself on from standby and corrupted windows again.

I totally wiped the disc, reformatted both partitions and reinstalled windows. Did a full Norton antivirus scan which came up clean. But the same happened again yesterday.

Anyone heard of a virus that can start your PC up from standby and reinstall itself ?

And that can survive a disc fomat and windows re-installation ?

I'm running XP Sp2 on an AMD64 with 1 Gb RAM 120 Gb disc.

Any help / advice most appreciated

I've never heard of that before in my life. A reformat wipes everything out, including any operating system, and therefor all viruses that go with it. This is if you are doing a full reformat. As you have already done so, and don't need the data on there, I would recommend choosing a disk eraser tool, such as Derik's Boot and Nuke (dban) and running that to completely destroy any data on your hd, and then resintalling windows at that point. However, you need to remember that that will return the disk to it's factory settings, with NOTHING on it......

thanks,

v

Yeah I thought that a reformat would clear everything.

I ran a disc wiping package called 12ghosts. Then deleted both C and D partitions before doing a full format and XP install.

Perhaps I am barking up the wrong tree and should look at a compatability issue with the last update from windows as it was at the last update that it all started to go pear shaped.

Other option is install XP and SP2 but not download any of the other windows updates (and turn liveupdate off)

Thanks for your help.

If I turn auto boot on error off I get the following message :-

STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The Session Manager initilisation process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc000026c (0x00000000 0x00000000).
The system has been shut down.

If a reformat would wipe any viruses, could it be some compatability issue that has only appeared with the latest windows hotfix ?

Hi there,

This could well be the work of a Windows hotfix. I would wager money that it's 890859. You need to follow these instructions for removing it;
How to uninstall a hotfix or Service Pack via the Recovery Console?

I'll give it a go.

Thank you very much for your help.

CHeers