Hello!

I have what seems to be a very difficult problem. After having no problems with a Windows ME laptop for many years, I ran into a serious issue last night:

* When booting, I get the following message: "Daemon cannot load daemon.exe." This is followed by another box: "Your current security settings prohibit running ActiveX controls on the page. As a result, the page may not display properly."

* Now, I'm allowed to continue into Windows. But upon loading, all of my dekstop items have disappeared, I can't access the start menu, and none of the icons I click on actually work.

* After trying to boot a few times, I now get a THIRD message: "scanregw has caused an error in scanregw.exe."

Basically the result is I'm stuck in DOS mode with a boot disk. I can't run anything in Windows. I'm thinking a spyware/virus issue -- is there any sort of DOS-based utility I can run, maybe?

Thank you muchly!

--adam

Hi there Adam, welcome to PCHF.

scanregw.exe could both be an trojan or a legit file from Microsoft.

Have you already tried booting in safemode? (hit f8 when booting up)
If you can still get in safemode, then please follow the instructions in the "Prework" link below in my sig and post back with the resulting Hijackthis and Spysweeper logs.