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Hydromancer

Hi, I've had my PC for over five years now. It is an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ with a 256 MB RAM and a 60 GB HDD. The operating system in Windows XP SP2. I have had Norton Antivirus and Norton Internet Security and Spybot Search and Destroy for a number of years. I have added Microsoft Defender and AOL antispyware to my PC Protection software in the past few months. I regularly run antivirus and antispyware software so consider myself clean on that front.

Recently, I have been experiencing problems. Windows boots and starts up as quickly as it always has. However, whenever I try to open applications and launch programs (e.g. Mozilla Firefox, Spybot, iTunes etc.), the programs take at least five minutes to load. This happens no matter how long the computer has been switched on for or how many times an application has opened.

I need help to sort this out...

madmonkey

Hello Hydromancer, welcome to PCHF.

Don't have complete faith in Anti-Spyware and Anti-Virus software. The only way malware/virus's can be stopped is if these companies are aware of them, and that your definitions are up to date. Even with the best software installed, they can often be missed. The software you have installed is by far the best out there. In fact, I personally consider both Norton and AOL to be the lowest of the low.

Just to be sure, it may be worth posting hijack and AVG logs of your system, by following PCHF Prework on my signature, and a member of security will analyse them for problems. If you still have problems after this, we'll look at other possibilities, altough I think malware is most likely here.