All Applications just close

To all,

Just recently turned a workgroup network into an Active Directory Domain network for a week. Nothing too fancy, just simple stuff.

Has anyone seen this problem before? 2 out of 3 workstations are beginning to act up quite weird. I wish I could give more details, but here is what is happening. If I were to run an application, it will load half way and just close out. I can't pull up the task manager to see what loaded, can't load up the Event Viewer, can't load up services MMC, etc... And there are programs that will load up, but won't function properly and close out. For example, Microsoft Outlook will load, but when it automatically or manually starts to send/receive e-mail, an error message saying the server can't be found and then closes.

I have ran an anti-virus program, but it scans about 10 seconds and just closes out as well.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what I can look at to see what is causing the problem? Or has anyone seen this problem before.

OS: Windows 2000 Professional w/ SP4 + All critical updates
Office 2000 Professional
Computer MFG. = Dell(s)

I do have to apologize before hand about error messages... I can't seem to load anything to get them. I am very experienced with the Windows Architecture, but this is something I have not seen before... at least at this magnitude of stubborness.

Thanks!

 

Three suggestions.

- start task mgr when you first start the machine and set it to always stay on top. You might be able to get a clue from that.

- examine the event logs on one or more problem PCs from another PC that is working. As long as the problem PC has an OS running, you should be able to remote to it's event logs.

- since it's possible that Dr. Watson is a)trapping the errors and b)has info that makes sense, a remote exam of them might help too.