Just suddenly slow, nothing will open

Hey people, I'm having a bit of trouble with Windows XP. About 30 mins ago, I had three web pages open. Then, I opened a fourth. But, it wouldn't open, it took ages and ages but nothing, I closed each of the three that was open down, but it wouldn’t let me so I had to choose the 'End Now' box. So I decided to restart windows, logged on to my account and waited for everything to start up. Took a little longer than normal. So I decided to try the internet again, I clicked on it, the 'working' arrow appeared then went as if to show that it has been loaded but nothing was on my screen, just the desktop. I thought i'll restart once more. Did so and the same thing happened. I can't open anything. If I right click something and select one of the options, it just won't open it. I can't even go to 'My Documents', could it be a virus? The other day I turned on the guest account for my sister so she could go on the net. I came on this and everything will work on here, can go on the internet. Once everything has loaded a dialog box will come up saying:

'kd
CreateFile failed
OK'

What's that supposed to mean? All help will be appreciated.

 

Try this

I'm afraid I'm just making a general suggestion which may or may not work for you since I don't have a clear understanding of your problem.

Boot up into SAFEMODE (press F8 key at very early booting of Windows).
If possible to boot, run you Antivirus program (hopefully it is up to date).

Good luck,

Dan

I assume you have sent this message on another machine. If you have access to a second machine which also runs Win XP and you know enough to physicallly move the hard drive of your afflicted machine to one that works --see if you can run Antivirus scan of the guest hard drive. Worth a try only if you are experienced in installing hard drives. Simplest would be with a USB external hard drive case.

 

Well, for some strange reason, I'm now allowed to open things. I scanned my computer with McAfee and it found a virus 'byteverify' which isn't anything major. Anyway, I still have one problem which is that my PC is running much slower. What could it be? Also, Windows came installed on my PC and didn't get a XP install CD with it.

 

'byteverify' is the ByteCodeVerify error in the MS VM exploit whereby CoolWebSearch trojans install themselves. Very nasty.

A classic sympton of CWS is a slow computer and IE searches going off to mysterious places for no apparent reason.

Visit http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/downloads.html and get CWS Shredder which is about the only thing which will remove it.

Then you should uninstall MS's VM (which is no longer supported) and install Java VM instead. Insructions for this are here.

 

Ok, I have uninstalled Microsoft VM, but I still have the same problem. Normally it would take the PC about one minute then I could open programs and it wouldn't be slow, but now it takes around four mins and it is still slow opening things. I've heard that having screensavers on can make the PC go slower but I haven't had one on for a long time. I can't think what it is.

 

Yeah, I removed the trojan by using McAfee and then I got rid of one of the files using CWS but it's still really slow.

 

No more Java!

After doing what you said in http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=32250 I now can't do anything to do with java. I have tried downloading from the Sun website, but nothing will now work. What am I supposed to do now? I can't just download the virtual machine as it is discontinued.

Merged

 

You should have posted to the original thread, but try this or this.