Some weeks ago, when I turned on my systen, although the boot process showed Windows loading, no desktop appeared.

After several attempts to solve this, I eventually concluded that I'd need to reinstall the operating system.

Unfortunately, because I replaced my mother board last year, I could no longer use the Dell-supplied W98SE re-install CD to do this.

So I took the system into my local repairman; he discovered that several excutables had been infected; first, he tried to do a cleanup; when that failed, he re-installed W98SE.

He also installed CA's eTrust anti-virus and Pest Patrol.

Since then, whenever I load the real-time CA virus and spyware shields, after a couple hours, my system slows down--programs take far longer to load; key strokes and mouse clicks take far longer to get a result. Often, everything momentarily freezes.

Even when I unload the shields, the slowdown remains. The only solution is to do a reboot.

I should mention that I have done virus scans and spyware scans with several different engines, from within Windows and from DOS. They found no corrupted files, and no worms, Trojan horses or spyware.

I'm using a Dell 4100 desktop, with a Pentium 3, at 866Mhz; 384k of memory.

Any suggestions?

Thank you.

First let me welcome you to PCHF. There are a lot of very knowedgable people here. Here is what I suspect might be going on. It looks like just from reading your post that you need to add more RAM. You only have 384K, and it looks like you are trying to run AV and Spyware in the background, which is going to use memory. This is probably the main cause of your system slowing down. It also sound like the system is infected with either a virus or malware. You said that the repairman said the he found some infected executable files. For something like that, one of the security gurus is going to need to look at that. Hope this helps.

Thanks for your fast reply. I appreciate your diagnosis, but the trouble is that even when the virus and spyware shields are running, the resource meter shows no serious diminution; nor does my memory-monitor, Cacheman.

Additionally, when the shields are unloaded, and the resource meter shows increased capacity and Cacheman shows a boost in memory, the slowdowns continue. As I believe I mentioned, only a reboot restores speed.

Hya Tom.

Do you also have other anti virus , anti spyware ect. protection running on youre pc?

If you click on the "Prework" link below in my sig , follow those instructions , and post back with the two resulting log files then i can see what is running on youre pc , and have a look if you indeed have a malware problem.

Thanks.

Attached you'll find the log files for both Spy Sweeper and HiJack This.

Didn't notice anything dangerous or critical.

I should mention that when I ran the latest TrendMicro pattern for Sysclean, it didn't find anything either.

And no, I have no other anti-spyware or anti-virus protection running on myt system, except when I load it for a separate scan (in which case, it's F-Prot for DOS, or, as I mentioned above, TrendMicro's Sysclean).

t

Attached Files

	Spy Sweeper Session Log.txt (24.6 KB, 3 views)
	Hijack~1.log (3.8 KB, 3 views)