Task Manager problems...Help!!!

[hlafarlett]

My mom's compaq presario lately has been freezing up so you have to do a hard boot to get it to unlock. She had some viruses and a worm in the past but they were taken care of.

But the main problem isnt the freezing. I cannot bring up her task manager. You click on it and it closes right back down. I have tried all the ways to access it and all of them fail to keep it open. I also found that the run commands on start menu dont work either...msconfig, regedit...etc. I can do all this however if i put the computer in safe mode. What could be causing it to act like this.

We cleaned up the computer. we dumped excess games to decrease the hard drive use, we scanned completely the computer and checked for spyware/adware and viruses all comes up clean...Help if you can.

 

[Lorand]

Temporarily you can use procexp (http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/procexp.shtml) instead of task manager. With this program you can even kill some processes that are dubious.

 

[Praetor]

You said you had viruses in the past; have you done a boottime scan or just in-windows scans?

 

[hlafarlett]

what is a boottime scan? we did a surface scan to check for damage and a norton scan what other scan is there...windows xp.

there is something going on her computer while slow is unusually slow and then the newest thing not opening task manager.

 

[Praetor]

what is a boottime scan?

Run the virusscan before starting windows (i.e., bootdisc)

we did a surface scan to check for damage and a norton scan what other scan is there...windows xp

Scandisk wont find any viruses... what norton scan are you talking about? Diskdoctor? Antivirus?

As for the taskmanager problem, use another process viewer to see what's going on

 

[hlafarlett]

She has Norton Systemworks. We did do a scan when it boots up that checks the computer for bad disks and files hoping to find one that was corrupted or damaged but it came back clean.

I just cant understand why all the sudden we dont have access to the task manager or the run commands. Only when i boot up in safe mode will it work....so at least i know its not the task manager that is damaged. Any other ideas to find the problem?????????

 

[tristan]

Ive seen this before. I was able to get rid of it by simply running stinger.exe (google it). It also locks your antivirus and renders it unable to be updated. In that case I was able to fix it by downloading the most recent update and doing a force update in safemode. Then running the scan.