Hey, everyone. I'm a frequent on these boards, even though I have never posted. This is basically because I've found the answers to all of my questions from other threads and subjects which other people, who've had the same problems I have, have posted.

Recently, though, I've ran into a problem that I haven't seen dealt with on here. I'm not exactly sure where I should post this, because I'm not exactly sure what it is, or why it's happening, despite hours of mind numbing research. The summation of what I've found about Rundll32.exe is irrelevant to how I can fix it.

Here is the problem: Whenever I start up my Laptop (an HP Pavillion dv6000, running Windows Vista ), a message repeatedly pops up saying

"Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library

Runtime Error!

Program: C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe

This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way. Please contact the application's support team for more information."

I read over the Malware Removal guide multiple times, and have followed it's excellent instruction on other computers, but I'm not sure if that will help with this problem. Even so, I've run all the spyware / anti-virus stuff (i.e. AVG, Spybot, Ad-Aware) and nothing's showed. I even went so far as to run them all in Safe Mode. I'm not sure if I wasted my time by doing that or not, but I want to be sure that the next thing I do -isn't- a waste of time. That's basically why I'm posting this right now.

Thanks for your patience and support.

I'm no expert with vista but it seems those errors are popping up with programs that are not vista compatible.(I've seen them reported with opening some games, ISP software, ect.)

Look in your start up and start disabling things one by one and rebooting untill maybe you find what the problem is.

Aye, I did that, and actually found that it had something to do with my sound card's drivers, and whatnot. Whatever it was, attempting to fix it made the sound malfunction, and somehow deleted the drivers all together. Eventually, the system crashed, and I ended up just restoring it to the default factory settings. I'm still not exactly sure what happened, or why it went wrong, but the problem seems to have been resolved as of now.

However, after that, another problem came up. I have a Maxtor One Touch external hard drive (80Gigs), and it was working pretty perfectly before this. I basically just use it to keep music on, so there's really not even that much on it. However, after restoring my computer, the hard drive has been lagging like crazy. I haven't been able to take anything off, or put anything on it by way of windows explorer. I've deleted a couple of files via dos commands, but it takes forever, and freezes up, usually ending with the system crashing.

I looked into this a bit, and found that there's a chkdsk and chkntfs command which a lot of other people found pretty useful. Well, when I used the chkdsk command, it said something along the lines of "cannot open for direct viewing," and something else having to do with volume. I'll re-do it after this system stops lagging; it seems windows explorer crashed. But when I used the chkntfs command (noting that the hard drive is formatted to ntfs), it said there wasn't anything wrong with it.

Any ideas?


Again, thanks for your time'n consideration

-Nate

Note an Admin: I'm pretty sure this doesn't have anything to do with spyware, so maybe it should be moved? Your call.

Scratch that post. I ended up downloading Paragon Partition Manager, and it reformatted the external hard drive just fine. I guess there was a corrupt file on there or something.

In any case, it works good as new now. Thanks again for your time and resources.

In response to your sound card conundrum, I think Vista totally redid how it codes for sound, and a lot of older devices aren't compatible.

My sound card drivers went wonky one time, and I have XP. So maybe that happened - no idea why it happened to my system, but I reinstalled them and it was all good.

AJ

Great word.