strange things

for the past week or so my computer has been doing weird things. folders appearing with nothing in them on the desktop. those little pictures you can have as your folder icon thingy changing to pornographic images and telling me i can not change them back to default because i am not authorized. but sometimes if i restart my computer i can then change some, but not all of the folders back. my computer has be super slugish, and some other strange things that i cant remember right now.

i have windows xp and ie6. i have System Suite 4.0. i have used it to scan for viruses, defrag, clean everything, and it has a purty good firewall too called Net Defence, at least it seems good. it found nothing wrong. i tried spybot and spyblaster but they found no spywear problems.

i did some searches on the internet and found pcpitstop.com

according to this site my computer is running perfectly but that my problem might be "bugs ". so i went to a site they suggested, pcbugdoctor.com/

i downloaded the program and ran it. it says it found 30 bugs in my computer but will not fix them unless i pay them $30 for one months use.

could the "bugs" that program found be what is making my computer act strange? is there any other programs that do the same thing but dont charge insane amounts of money just to "fix" my "bug" problem?

sorry if i'm not making any sense, i dont know how else to phrase what is going on or what i have done to try to fix it only to end up in a still weird hole.

 

I'd be wary of programmes that find problems but won't fix them till you pay money. On principle I'd rather do a reformat than give them the pleasure!

Sounds like spyware or some weird virus.

You have used the update button in Spybot for the latest definitions?

Install Ad-Aware and imediately use the update button before running.

I have no experience with System Suite 4.0 for virus protection so maybe uninstall it, or the virus component, and go to www.grisoft.com and download their free virus software AVG 6.0, it's excellent even if it wasn't free! Once again use the update button. Update DATs come out every 2 or 3 days for this antiviral programme.

Have you used system restore to restore windows to before a week ago? Please don't say your one of those rocket scientists who has disable system restore
System restore is not a complete panacea, but it can correct many problems and is worth a try.

 

I second Paul's advise on updating spybot, installing and updating Ad-aware and also suggest you run CWShredder. It's in my signature. Click the downloads link on the left then scroll down to CWShredder (zipped).

 

Hi Lucky Kitten

sound very like a CWS problem - unfortunately the link for CWShredder in Dave's post isn't working too well at the moment due to a DDoS attack on anti-spyware sites, if it won't work for you see this thread which has alternative links

...probably also a good idea to pay a visit to Windows Update, there's a patch for the vulnerability which the CWS scam uses to get in

(critical update for Microsoft Virtual Machine)

best wishes, HJ

 

Updated my link this morning. Is it not working for you, Hugh?

 

it is now but wasn't when I posted earlier... gave a blank just like the other one did with the DDoS on, so seeing www.merijn.org (rather than numbers, or majorgeeks or something) in the status bar I just assumed it was the old link. Hence the post. Well done for updating.

best wishes, HJ.