April Fool Prank??

I have Windows XP Home, Sp 3 on two computers. On April 1 I turned on my spare computer and it would boot only to the background desktop with no icons or taskbar and then lock up. It would not respond to ctrl-alt-del. Only to a hard restart. Acronis restore wouldn't work. The computer worked fine in Safe Mode. I tried System Restore to several "Software Distribution Service" backups and it always returned me to the background desktop with no icons and no taskbar. I finally used a non-software distribution service restore and the computer restored to normal. I ran Avast! Virus software and found nothing.

At that point I was ready to accept the fact that sometimes things happen. But then I booted up my main computer and the same thing happened!!

I tried all the things that I did before, but none worked. Finally I gave up. A few hours later I plugged in the external usb hard drive which I had been using on the other computer and booted up. The computer worked fine! Thinking that the usb drive might have had something to do with it, I shut down, removed the drive and booted back up. The computer worked fine.

Today I discussed the situation with my computer technician and he could offer no explanation, but did alert me to the Kaspersky TDSSKiller file which I downloaded and ran. It found nothing. It doesn't seem likely that a virus could run and then delete itself but I cannot think of any other explanation.

Both computers continue to work fine.

Does anyone have any ideas?

 

Apart from Google's Mobile Email joke, I haven't heard of any others. Neil.