Win98 comp gone totally nuts, urgent!

Factual Questions
1

My neighbours come to me with all the computer problems they have on their Win98 SE comp. It’s got AOL on it, so they’ve had run-ins with viruses. They don’t know how not to download them or something, I dunno. Just a few weeks ago they had a run-in with a nasty one that made the comp have to be rebuilt.

Now it’s got a totally different, but worse, quirk. The wife signs onto AOL, opens an email from the browser for a different site. Gets an email with an Excel attachment. She previews the attachment somehow (I didn’t ask, maybe she did download it, but it was what she was wanting). Tries to print it. It’s huge, hangs the computer, so she reboots. Now it’s STUCK in 640x480 16-colour mode. Rebooting and going to Control Panel -> Display won’t let me change it. No programs will run for varying reasons. The computer tells me Win98 is unregistered. And that the modem doesn’t exist. Etc. She’s bringing it to a shop tomorrow, but wants to know what is wrong with it first. And that’s not the ‘virussy’ part.

The AOL icon on the desktop now, instead of saying “AOL 7.0” or whatever underneath, says the AOL account’s password (only one screen name) instead.

Is this a software or hardware problem, or a virus? I can’t even run Norton Virus-stuff to see what’s up, since nothing works.

Thanks for any help you can possibly give me for fixing it and saving her a bunch of expenses by the shop.

2

I can’t see this being a hardware problem.

  1. If it’s stuck in 640x480, as you say, then it is likely that the adapter drivers are messed up. Just click on Display/Settings/Advanced/Adapter and reinstall the adapter drivers. Also look at the Monitor tab and make sure it refers to the correct monitor.

  2. If you think it’s worth the effort, then reinstall Win98 over the current install; but from the looks of it, a complete format and reinstall of the OS would be in order.

3

What xhash said, and an intensive scandisk test of the disk surface might also be reccommended. Sounds like bunch of busted system files. Also if they used a floppy they used when the PC was infected they may have re-infected themselves.

4

w98 has ‘scanreg /restore’ you can run from the DOS prompt. I used it sometimes to restore a previous registry, won’t do much for you if you have a virus though.

5

Fixing the monitor drivers won’t fix everything. It’ll only fix the 640x480-mode thing that I don’t care about. I want to fix the problem where the computer suddenly doesn’t realize any programs work, and that Win98 is registered, and I want to know why AOL’s desktop-name is the AOL password instead of “AOL 7.0” which seems to indicate a weird virus in my opinion. If I can fix this “nothing works” problem, I’m sure the monitor will be fixed too.

I will try the scanreg /restore deal though, and can you run scandisk from DOS prompt too? That may be the only way for me to do that, the way almost nothing seems to be working.

6

The most common cause for this is somebody doing either a “slow double-click” or a “triple-click” on the AOL icon. The first will cause Windows to think that you want to change the caption under the desktop icon, and the second will not only act as a “slow double-click”, but it will also launch AOL.

If it’s timed just right, the focus will remain on the rename box instead of the AOL screen-- when you type in your password, thinking that you’re typing it into the password box, it will rename the icon to what you just typed, instead.

-David

7

Oh, just to set your mind at ease-- you may very well have a virus, trojan, or worm, but the renamed icon is not indicative of one.

From a coding point of view, creating a trojan that would rename the icon would serve no purpose, and it would be self-defeating.

The API calls needed to harvest the password and screennames from the AOL boxes are so far removed from the API calls needed to rename the icon that it would probably never happen, even by accident.

Anything’s possible, of course, but it’s more likely that someone simply “triple-clicked” the AOL icon.

Best of luck to ya.

-David

8

I’m pretty sure it was just a triple-click. I wonder why all the mediocre computer-users I know have such a hard time pressing the mouse button twice semi-fast? Odd.

Anyway, Scandisk is running. Found a lot of errors, so I set it to auto-correct and…well, it should take ~2 hours to complete, so I’m sitting at home for a while. Then I’ll see what’s cookin’, and then perhaps stick in the registry from earlier.

Interestingly enough, when I went to redo the registry (before I scandisked), it had a backup from the current day, so I said to try that one. Backup of current = no errors, it said, but when I installed the other one, the computer had no idea about the monitor, keyboard or mouse, yet got the drivers from its own hard drive and fixed them. Still can’t change the monitor yet.

And if worse comes to worst, I have the 3-CD backup thingy from HP I can try to fix everything with. Thanks for the help so far, I didn’t think of registry/driver errors (but I’m really sick lately, so I have an excuse, nyah).

9

When you get done with scan disc, another great tool if you suspect system files have been corrupted, is the System File Checker. Go to Accessories/System Tools/System Information. Under the Tools menu, select System File Checker. This will analyze your system files, and if any of them are found to be corrupted or missing, you will be prompted how to extract replacements from the Win 98se CD-ROM.

10

When you said nothing works, what are the symptoms? Nothing happens? All the programs bomb out with some kind of error messages? Running any program will cause the computer to hang? What?

11

By the way, how did you run the programs? Double clicking icons on the desktop and/or in the “Programs” menu?

12

I fixed part of it…after lots of fiddling, rebooting, and Scandisking, it figured out that it had a monitor, and let me set it back to regular…and a few programs started working (AOL, WordPad, other simple things), yet most of the rest gave errors about not knowing how to use the .lnk whether I tried via the desktop, or the Programs menu, or saying there was no modem (for AOL), or saying Win98 wasn’t registered (it is). I didn’t bother to try to run the programs via…anything else, the seemingly-empty registry was bothering me more, how it doesn’t recognize anything as being there, not just for how to run programs.

The computer hung up at no point, although when Scandisking it restarted about 50 million times, although before I had removed all things from running in the background but Systray, Explorer and ScanDisk.

There is no Windows CD, just a Hewlett-Packard 3-CD set for restoring everything on the computer. I chose not to use them because I couldn’t tell exactly what would happen, and the people at ‘the shop’ fixed the computer up right as rain last time, so I’d rather leave that process to them (plus they can keep all the files, where I can’t guarantee it).

I also checked msconfig to see if there was anything suspicious booting up at the beginning…nothing. It was a cleaner msconfig than my computer has.

Reinstalling an older registry set did help though - it enabled the computer to go “hey…this is a MONITOR…and a MOUSE WOW and HEY here are some drivers on my HDD about them…let’s use them!” finally. Didn’t fix any other problems though.

The computer is about four to five years old now, so I could see some overheating problem or something happening that…did something weird. The computer at least is going to be replaced soon enough, the owners say now, so I guess it’s not really an urgent manner anymore (and they’re taking it to the shop tomorrow too no less, so I can’t help them save money :frowning: ).

Curiousity still gets the better of us, at least to know if it’s hardware failure at some level, some virus, or something else. And sorry about how disjointed this must be, I’m too sick to fix it. :o

13

Okay, it seems that the registry got corrupted quite badly, so it can’t tell Windows is registered, can’t use any of the icons on the desktop, and so forth.

It might be a virus or just some very very rare Windows bug.

BTW restoring will wipe the HDD clean, so you need to backup the data first.