The other day I left for work, my roommate was going to watch some videos on my computer (as he has done many times), and everything is fine.

Windows XP Home, I let it update so it's on whatever most recent service pack there is. I keep good care of it, spyware free and run scans for those, use Firefox online, run NOD32 antivirus, which by the way found no problems.

I get home that evening and the computer is weird. I'll list the problems in a mostly random order as I remember them. First of all, bootup was slow. It stuck on the blue Windows screen right before the desktop for too long. Then it took too long for the desktop to come up. Then I noticed immediately that my taskbar was too thin. I have it on auto-hide and it DOES do that, except that instead of popping up into a regular taskbar, it pops up into a very thin taskbar with no Start button, no program buttons, no clock, nothing. The "unhidden" taskbar isn't much thicker than the "hidden" one, which as you know is only like a line or two of pixels at the bottom of the screen. The arrows appear for resizing the taskbar, but they don't accomplish that. I can't move it anywhere else onscreen.

I can right-click for taskbar properties still. I can trick the taskbar into appearing by enabling a toolbar, such as Desktop, and then I can resize the taskbar to a normal size, and then disable Desktop toolbar and voila, the taskbar remains and I can access the Start button. However, no open programs appear in the taskbar, and I must use Alt+Tab to get any minimized programs. The taskbar is not locked, and I can see that there are no settings causing it to do this. This isn't normal stuff.

AT FIRST, an open program would disappear completely if I clicked on the desktop, then I could bring it up with Alt+Esc or Alt+Tab. However that stopped after I first "tricked" the taskbar into appearing, after that, programs would stay visible if I clicked on the desktop behind them.

Other problems:

-Start button on keyboard does not activate Start button on XP.

-There is no paste. Cut and copy work, but paste is always greyed out. I have opened that clipboard viewer program and can see that information is making it onto the clipboard, there is just no paste.

-I cannot drag and drop anything. I can't move anything. Thinking about grabbing a third-party file manager so I can move files to back them up before possibly replacing Windows.

-I cannot do Search in Windows. When I go to it, all I see on the left panel of explore is that dog, animated, sitting in an empty white window. Completely unresponsive, and no field for inputting search parameters.

-I read that NOD32 can mess up ActiveX in my researchings of various symptoms as I found them. So I ended up uninstalling it. Now if I try to uninstall something, or install something, it says that Windows Installer just isn't there.

-Many things are slower, but not everything.

-I'm not able to watch videos at all. I forget the error it told me.

-There is no sound and WinAmp said something to the effect of not finding any way to process sound. Too bad I decided to wait until I wasn't home, now I can't tell you the exact error messages.

-ActiveX doesn't work in IE.

For the most part, the computer still works fine. I have run a check for the Blaster virus, as well as fixed one invalid registry entry that was found on a site about infections (and which did nothing). I have also run Spybot, Lavasoft, and TuneUp Utilities.

Oh yeah, I ran the Blaster virus program (from Symantec) in Safe Mode, as the Administrator. Oddly enough, the same problems were all still there: The taskbar was messed up the same way as I described, there was no paste, etc.

Obviously this all happened at once, except for the two changes I noted, in that open programs stopped vanishing if I clicked on the desktop behind them, and that I was able to uninstall one program but now Windows Installer appears to be nonfunctional, both for installing as well as uninstalling anything at all.

PLEASE HELP! I'm close to deciding to doing a system rollback or just replacing Windows with a fresh install (plus I've been needing to do a backup).

Alternative Advice: Any good third-party file managers? I notice my Irfanview can still copy and move images all around, so any non-explorer programs could help me organize my files before I try backing up. Hopefully it'll be a simple one-executable portable program, because remember, I can't install anything.

Thanks for any help,
-John

Hi JohnD you wil need to do the prework and post back it sound like it maybe a spywhere/malwhere problem follow the steps here http://www.pchelpforum.com/hijackthi...a-prework.html

Alright, I'll get around to this, I just don't have the time I need to be handling this kind of stuff right now.

Alright, well I couldn't use the two spyware programs because I can't install anything, plus I run others consistently, so here is my HijackThis log attached.

Always meant to try out that program, too. Thanks for any help with figuring out what's going on.

Newest related problem found: Clicking on the mousewheel does not bring up the page-scroller. However, wheel-click DOES work for opening tabs in Firefox.

Oh and more details on two problems.

VIDEO: When I try to open a video through the default association, media player (some files use the regular MP while some use Classic), the Media Player program comes up as if it's about to play the video, then just disappears. Takes just under a second. However, VLC media player works just fine, but NO SOUND (see below).

AUDIO: When I double-click an MP3, it used to say that it couldn't detect a sound card, but NOW it doesn't do anything at all, it doesn't even try opening WinAmp. That's what's troubling me, there are tiny things that are happening differently than they did just recently (and I'm only speaking of after this computer problem set in). There are no system sounds obviously, no sound works.

-John

Attached Files

hijackthis.log (8.6 KB, 2 views)

This is might be a shot in the dark but it is worth a try do a system restore to a date before you had the problem

instructions here How to restore the operating system to a previous state in Windows XP

after doing that is it all back to normal?

Eh, well I haven't had System Restore enabled for years. So it doesn't have any backup.