[vodmare]

Hey guys, How has everyone been? Well my machine locks at least 3 times a day if it's a good day, but that's beside the point. After I log into my machine around 2 minutes later my desktop shows up with my background picture.....then around 3-4 minutes later all my icons and what not finally decide to make an appearance.I removed most of the last pieces of software I installed thinking that might be it......anyone know of a way to check and see what is making it hang?I mean, I know and have the progs that allow you to see whats running but that kind of defeats the purpose. I need to know what the heck is making do a LAX security check before my machine boards it's flight to the pentagon.....Thanks :)-vodmare.

[RoryH]

Hey Vodmare,Can you supply us with some more info about your system such as OS, how old is it, memory, power supply, video card, manufactured system or custom...?How long have you been having this problem? Had you made any changes to the system prior to this starting? How many startup programs do you show listed in MSCONFIG/Startup? When is the last time you updated ALL of your drivers including periphereal(sp?) devices? Also, does it take as long to boot into Safe Mode?

[vodmare]

Lets see, it was an old machine when I got it....well I mean it was a newer model but used and I modded it somewhat.P4 2.4 GHZ1.5 GIG Rammainboard P4PB 400-LnVidia Geforce 440 AGPNic is some generic realteksound is creative sb live1 DVD dual layer HP burner 1040dSATA card for a sata HDDreg non SATA HDDMSconfig reports 15 things at startup and safemode seems to go pretty fast. I have been doing a driver here and there I think that is going to be where I start tonight though.-vodmare.

[RoryH]

15 items in your startup is quite a lot. I would start by eliminating two or three at a time, reboot, and try two or three more again until you notice a difference.If your system is older I would imagine the SATA card may be an issue as well: the BIOS probably does not know how handle that. At least make sure the drivers are up to date on that!Your RAM may be too much for the BIOS too....How old is the system? You have to remember Windows did not handle more then 512 MB until just a few short years ago.AND, on top of all that, you're running a SATA HDD on a card and an IDE HDD....is one slaved off the other?

[vodmare]

I am not savy enough or patient enough to insert a .jpg that I made of my msconfig screen shots, so I linked them through www.yousendit.comhttp://download.yousendit.com/DE6190180595D867I certainly can understand your auto concern downloading from a complete stranger, but look around on the site, I'm not real new and I have been getting help here for a while. In short, it's a legit screen shot. Because you cannot resize the screen, the shot on top shows whats running and the shot on the bottom shows the actual directory location of whats running.As for the HDD, the SATA is run by itself on the SATA card and the IDE is run by itself onto the mainboard.,As for the bios, I have always heard horror stories of people flashing the bios and it killing it......should I do this for the sata card and the mainboard? Would that be wise?Most of the stuff running on startup is good stuff as far as I can tell, antivirus, firewall, antispy, sys mechanic etc. But there are two that don't list and I don't know what they are.Anyway man, thanks for your help so far it is appreciated.-vodmare.+

[vodmare]

Actaully, I just ran all of my scanner stuff and my AVG had quarantined a file from a "anonymous surfing" program that I tried out.trojan horse backdoor.generic7.lskso I am researching this also, anyone know anything about this one?Man I don't wanna have to change all my PW......Thanks.-vodmare.*EDITAND NOW it says that my AAW2007 AVAST FREE ANTISPYWARE.EXE is infected with "trojan horse downloader.generic5.pio or p10.and my scanner has found like 66 cookie trackers.....man my machine is hosed!

[rgreen4]

Vodmare - good to have you back. I was wondering how everything was going. I hope everything is OK in GA and that you are now back home.Although Spiritwind disagrees, I would do a registry clean after you defrag the HD. Is the IDE the boot drive? I personally use PC Tools' Registry Mechanic. It costs $30 a year, but if you have more than one machine, the license is good for 3 machines. It backs up the registry first. I use it on 3 machines and have not had a problem.There are some freebies out there, but read the reviews first as some seem to leave a bit to be desired. I had a real slow XP Pro machine before I started cleaning out the registry.

[vodmare]

Yeah man, good to hear from you. Things are going as well as can be expected. Seems like if it's not one thing its another. just found 66 cookie trackers and two trojans on my machine.....but other than that life is great! Im being sarcastic, actually I am learning a lot also.I use registry mechanic and system mechanice, my drive says that its 37% defragged so I guess after doing a driver marathon I shall be a defragging.How are things with you?-vodmare.

[RoryH]

Vodmare,The two items in MSCONFIG that don't have a description next to them....uncheck them. THen reboot and see what that does. LEAVE them unchecked anyway. Then I'd uncheck AVGAS, AVGCC and MSASCui just to see what happens. I know AVGAS and AVGCC are the A/V programs, but never hurts to see what kind of hit your system takes with them. Also do a search for tvDebug.log: this is Zone Alarms log file and can get rather bloated, so when Zone Alarm loads it may be slowing that app down on the intial boot/load. If you find it go ahead and delete it after checking how large it is. You can and should recheck them after testing them. Probably uncheck REGCON too as well as schedhlp just to see. Do them in pairs and reboot, then do two more.I would stay away from a BIOS flash too-would not help with the SATA anyway. Remember: running the SATA drive through a card is very inefiicient as the info has to go through the card instead of just through the board alone.Get rid of the quarantined Trojan: Trojans are BAD......get rid of all tracking cookies too.Sounds like were getting good info for t-shooting though, keep posting!

[vodmare]

Thanks for your help, I was just about to flash the bios too, but I found a help file on it that said they manufactuer did not suggest it.....then my inet connection went down for a minute. Does that some times.....Well, I shall do what you said, update drivers and do some defraggin. I just uninstalled around 5 programs that all tweak or work with the registry or help speed the system and what not. I whittled it down to just reg and sys mechanic. Those seem to do a good job.-vodmare.*EDITMust of done something right, it loaded right up this time. I turned off the phanton startup files and the regcon (its for my Mediacom to make sure I'm me BS) and ran 2 more spy / malware apss - Now I am off to find drivers and defrag.....funny thing.....all of my youtube videos on my site play except one.....trying to figure that out now. But that's another problem for later in the night. :) Thanks guys.-vodmare.

[RoryH]

Great! Sounds like you're making progress; I think you're on the road to recovery! :DAs far as the video, it probably just picked up some corruption or damage (You Tube, My Space, at al are ALL targets for all those lame slackers out there that have nothing better to do than write virus', malware, etc.!). If you still have a good copy on your hard drive you might just want to reload it.

[vodmare]

I agree, man.....two years ago it was not like this, 5 years ago only the real paranoid with something to protect had any real virus protection......now it's exploded. When I installed my AVG Firewall (free version) The second that I turned it on after rebooting I already have 4 hits to my machine.....and of course there are something like 18,000 hits now with some ungodly number of high rated attacks.Where does it all end.As for the YOUtube thing, I killed all my cache, cookies, history, forms etc. and that seemed to fix it. Thankfully I won't have to re-upload this time.-vodmare.

[RoryH]

Yeah, until about two years ago I ran without any A/V programs; now there are so many loosers out there runing virus', spam, phishing, etc. you HAVE to have something! Really ruins what is and can be an even better technology/experiance!Anyway, glad to hear things are running better. Sounds like AVG is doing it's job! Just keep running it and any spyware scan you have until you're sure it's clean.:D