What a s***ty night and day I've just had.

Forced into a format and reinstall last night by reasons unknown.

Out of the blue, I suddenly couldn't run any programmes at all except Internet Explorer, just kept getting the message "do you want to run or save this file?", which just kept popping back up when I pressed yes..

When booting, got the same request for every one of the items in my startup sequence, so I had no AV running etc.. Couldn't even access Windows Firewall to see if it was running, or System Restore.

Had a quick visit here, but didn't stay long without AV and firewall, and more worrying, my recguard (system recovery partition protection) wasn't running.

The name that kept popping up with most of these blocking messages was "rundll32".

Had a look at that dll last night, and it was the only one in system32 not to have the two cogs on its icon, just plain, and after reinstalling today, it's still the same. Is that trying to tell me something?

Anyway, the biggest headache was Microsoft Update. That flaming programme kept giving me error messages, but eventually got it working. Only 74 updates to install.

It was probably something simple, but seemed too risky to come asking advice with no security software running at all, so opted for a reinstall. Probably needed a spring clean anyway.

If anyone has any ideas as to what caused this, I would be interested to hear them, and in the meantime I'll do a Hijackthis log, which I'll post.

Would appreciate someone looking at it just to make sure.

The joys of lalaland. You just have to laugh.

That just sucks.... did you loose a lot of personal data, or did you back it up???

AJ

I'm not sure what exactly you described but its doesn't sound fun.
Why didn't you have an AV installed? Was IE trying to download random files? And why couldn't you just reboot and have everything back to normal with that program? (doesn't it save a copy of your system partition? )

Without knowing what the rundll error messages said I cant really say what was going wrong.
At least everything is fixed now..

Also Dennis my rundll32 doesn't have a cog on either. Did you try safe mode?

have a read here just for a bit of background.

http://inquirer.philly.com/newsroom/faq/pa...fdb7df9-65.html

Also with returnil, are you still using it?

Thankfully, I partitioned my drive a week or so ago, so all pics, music etc were all on the partition.

Just lost a lot of installed software. No big loss.


At the time, I wasn't on line. Double clicked Picaso as it happens and got, if I remember rightly, the download manager asking if I wanted to run or save the file.

Bit puzzled by this, so just clicked cancel and tried again. Same result, so I clicked run. Same message kept popping up.

Tried another shortcut, same thing. Now I've got butterflies. Every exe. file of every piece of software I had installed resulted in the same message box appearing.

First obvious thing to do was reboot. Usually gets rid of small glitches.

Wrong! As it was rebooting, the process kept stopping with the same message box for, I think, every entry in my startup.

So no, I didn't have an AV running, but only because like everything else in my startup, it wouldn't run.

Couldn't access most things in control panel, like "security centre", or "system restore", so I had no idea if I even had the firewall up.

Don't know why, but Internet Explorer was the only thing I could run.

Anyway, rebooted and started in safe mode. Exactly the same thing. Same message box.

Managed to access System Restore by rebooting and hitting the F key.

Chose a restore point and hit the button. Did it's thing and then restarted itself for a few seconds, and then nothing. Tried a couple of times same result.

Sick by now, formatted.


Thanks for the link Hazel, Returnil wasn't running at the time, and as mentioned above, tried safe mode.

Off topic now, but I hear a voice screaming "you're teas getting cold"

Back later.

Just realised what programme you mean. Do I detect just the faintest trace of sarcasm there?

I can take it.

If I'd had it running, absolutely. But at the time, I was off line working with some photographs, and as I mentioned in a previous novel, I use Returnil primarily for trying new software.

Wouldn't have been much good saving photos into a copy of My Pictures in memory.

What I do remember, is trying out Power Defragmenter, and then running an exe file called SIW, a system information thing.

After that, I couldn't run or launch anything except IE. Not even Faststone Capture, but I did take a pic of the screen.


This is the same window which appeared after clicking every shortcut. And after rebooting, this same window appeared for every file in my startup sequence.

And the same window appeared in safe mode.

A file download from C:/program files?

Anyway, it's all sorted now, but it would be nice to know what happened.

No sarcasm intended.
I was just asking why it wasn't working.

Maybe the defrag messed something up?

Well, I think I'll stick with an occasional JKDefrag defrag.

I have no sympathy for people who say mean things about cats.

LOL just kidding. I'm sorry to hear about the problems with your computer. I know what it's like to have your PC go alien on you. At least it's fixed now though. Stupid machines.

LOL I saw your post in the other thread...something about cats being sent to an outpost on the other side of the moon. Ring a bell? lol

Guilty as charged.

And if there's a cat god up there somewhere, he certainly delivered his vengeance on me last night.

Serves you right! Hehe just kidding.

Actually on my other computer, I had something similar happen. Back a LONG time ago, I had downloaded Kazaa, and let it install the spyware that came with it, but I quickly removed it with Ad-Aware. I downloaded like 3 songs, and shut it down at the end of the day. I booted my computer up the next day, and all my icons were there, but it seemed as though everything had been uninstalled. The system was eventually wiped out and totally cleaned (with a jacked copy of Win 2000 Pro !)

Been fine ever since, but a few months ago, the floppy drive stopped working, and the sound card icon disappeared, and only works with certain things... I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling the cards, but to no avail. I think it needs a clean wipe, and I'm thinking about converting it into a Linux machine.

AJ

Know that feeling, I'm STILL reinstalling stuff after my unplanned reformat last week. Still got about half the programs to go but got the most important ones on and am just reinstalling a few here and there when I can be bothered

JD, it was an oversight of mine not to extend my sympathies to you last week, because it is a pain having to reinstall a lot of stuff.

Two things I'm thankful for are 1: Getting hold of Paragon Special Edition and actually getting my a**e into gear and partitioning my one drive, and 2: Keeping Installation Packages and all registration details of various free stuff such as Paragon.

A couple of things I'm not happy about, are 1: Completely forgetting about my Bookmarks. A lot of bookmarks. And 2: Not making an Image of my System Partition. Something Paragon can do.

The only positive thing, is that I've cleanly gotten rid of a lot of software I was keeping in case it came in handy. Stuff thats not going back on.

I've got a shed in my yard full of stuff that might come in handy. Wasted space.

Hey, I'm at that stage as well, after being forced to reinstall last week, I have so much less software on my computer now.

I had backups of all but one of the installers and registration details I needed, and RRidgely kindly provided the missing one (which was immediately burned to disc ).
I would have lost alot of bookmarks too but luckily have been using the Firefox Extension Backup Extension (FEBE) so had backups of most of my bookmarks (about 600!!!!!). Lost a few though as I'd not backed them up for a month or so. And annoyingly gained a load back that I didn't want as I'd only just gone through them clearing out dead links and duplicates (with AM Deadlink) and manually clearing out and reorganising bookmarks I don't use/need anymore, which as you can imagine took some time with 600. Just building myself up to doing it again

I have a Live Distro CD of a Linux operating system called Slax that I keep handy in case I ever had problems starting the computer and had to access the internet in an emergency (for example to seek urgent advice from here).

It runs directly from the CD and unloads itself into, and runs directly from, RAM, without needing to touch the hard drive. Although it also will have no AV program and firewall running, given how it runs it should be safe to run - it runs at computer startup (you need to change the BIOS settings to run the CD).

http://www.slax.org/

It also doubles as an emergency data recovery method as, although it is not possible to save anything to the CD (when you close down Slax everything is lost, as it is stored in RAM), you can navigate via the Explorer in Slax to your C:Drive (or whatever) on the hard drive and upload data you need to an online storage program, or email the data to yourself. It is handy, albeit slow, if you are no longer able to boot into the Windows partition / hard drive etc.

From my previous experience, my bro did something and reinstalled windows with files (from the profile folder, except programs that write in the registry and will require reinstallation) and updates intact. I'm not sure if it's the BIOS or a feature itself or the Restore feature created by Microsoft. Giving an info to show that "reformat loses all files" is not always true

You've got mine.

many computers ship with a hidden partition that allows the user to be able to reinstall Windows either with or without destroying personal data etc that is held there (as opposed to shipping with a Windows XP disk). Perhaps that is what your brother did?

On my computer it is reachable by repeatedly pressing F10 at computer startup - all of the 3 options then will restore the application software and pre-installed software back to factory settings. One option just resets everything without touching personal data, one option moved personal data to its own file structure and the ultimate option destroys all personal data and leaves the computer "as new". All options do require all Windows updates to be downloaded once again - and the longer the computer has been owned, the more updates there are...

The recovery solution software on my computer is marketed by PC Angel

http://www.pcangelsolutions.com/index.htm

Ours is barebones and those HDs with "hidden partitions" like what HP have on their hard drives are non-existent on such country where I live in. Still I wonder how it is done, and it can greatly help in gettin' the files again

hmmm... that doesn't seem great if the files corrupt for any reason and the computer has to be restored to its factory settings.

This is a screen shot, from that pcangel website of the first screen I see when the computer boots into the System Recovery partition - I dare say many people with HP type computers will have much the same...

http://www.pcangelsolutions.com/screen01grand.jpg


other screen shots are at

http://www.pcangelsolutions.com/advantage.htm

I'm running a Compaq Presario (HP) and the HD has a recovery partition, about 6gb, which isn't actually hidden, but there are visual warnings to leave it well alone.

There's also an application called recguard which runs on startup which hopefully does what it says, "Guard the Recovery Partition".

There are two options with it, RECOVERY or DESTRUCTIVE RECOVERY. Both options remove all software you have installed yourself, although the first is supposed to keep all data files ie Pics, Music.

If anyone else here has these features, believe me, on one occasion the non destructive recovery removed all the data files as well, but fortunately, I didn't trust it so I backed them up beforehand.

Truth be told, this recovery partition is worth its weight in gold.

Edit: Thanks fredvries, appreciate that.

...with MS Windows installed on them!

Yeah it is and we made those all by ourselves back in the Win9x era, but solely because the installation was loads faster than installing via a CD and installing from HDD also made Win98 just seem to run smoother for longer before needing to be formatted again. I still have my Win98 install partition on my Win98 PC that includes critical software, some downloaded software, and some commercial software too.

Those partitions really come in handy if a CD/DVD drive has went kaput which happened to me in 2000 or 2001, and when that happened I also appreciated having a floppy drive just to get some small sized needed applications installed like zip/unzip software.

I have recguard running on my computer too, but it would appear that the recovery solution it protects has been made by a different company as mine has three options (as in that screenshot above), one of which definitely doesn't do anything other than reinstall all the factory shipped applications and settings, whilst leaving alone any software I have downloaded such as firefox, thunderbird etc. It does, however, reset any pre-installed software back to its original version eg Adobe Reader, iTunes, which mean I have to then update.

Anyway, glad to hear you have sorted out the problem, hopefully it won't occur again!

Leaving your downloaded stuff sounds like a good idea Robbie, but I think I prefer a clean slate if I've had a problem bad enough to warrant reinstalling.

Probably an over-reaction, but we do whatever we feel more comfortable with I suppose.

Anyway reinstalling all this stuff keeps me out of trouble, and it gets rid of a lot of software that's never used.

I prefer a clean reinstall too - in fact I have an image of the factory shipped Windows XP system stored on disk, and backed up to another TWO disks and have used it to reinstall everything after I had a major computer problem last year - to ensure the problem was properly dealt with I wiped the entire hard drive using a program called DBAN (not for the faint hearted! - it wipes everything - literally, all partitions including the system recovery partition as well as the user partition etc leaving the computer with a hard drive that has nothing on it, no partitions or anything else - completely blank). I then started the computer, inserted the disk at the prompt and it then formatted the hard drive, created the recovery partition and then unpacked everything to the user (C:) partition.

I had everything backed up I needed - all my data, the exe files for all my software etc, so I had the computer up and running smoothly quite quickly with only the Windows Updates to worry about. Obviously that was done because of the problem I had at the time, now I would just use the destructive recovery in the system recovery partition to return the computer to its factory state and then reinstall that way. The image disks are just "insurance". My system recovery solution allows the creation of a backup image disk (only one though, as per Windows licence), this is what I did when I first bought the computer then I just copied that disk twice for further peace of mind - all three copies work fine.

Hazel, I owe you an apology.

I never looked closely at this because I thought it was a link to some info on safe mode, which I'd already tried.

Don't ask what made me come back to this post, but I'm pleased I did, as there's a lot of info on that site.

Dennis your apology is accepted You were very stressed after all your reinstalling!

Yes, it is quite an interesting article with some good rundll info in it.

No Sympathy For The Devil.