Help with strange Windows/ Dos Problem Please

For about 2 days now I've been having a black box (DOS screen I believe) pop up on the screen for 1-3 seconds. This happens every 5-15 minutes.

So far I've Defraged the HD, ran Nortons, AD-ware, Spybot, and CCleaner none of which seem to help.

The screen does not stay on long enough to read what is says on top.
I'm at a lost to pinpoint the problem.

Only other symptoms it has, is sometimes I get a "memory terminated" error when closing IE. However that's only once a week, if that.

I really don't want to reformat and reinstall, so i'm open to other suggestions.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,

Tom

 

It would be nice to find out what in in that box. Can you watch it and hit the print scr key while it is showing and then paste that into a picture editing program? If so and if you have available web space, upload it and put a link here. If not, email it to me with a link to this thread and I'll post it for you.

Also check your event logs for any entries that contain more information. If you find one or several, double-click open the event, click the icon below the up/down arrows to send a text copy to your clipboard, and paste the results here.

 

Soory can't do print screen, it's just to darn quick. I believe the box itself it blank. There is something in the blue title on top though. I believe it's something pertaining to C:\owner\documents and settings ...... (can't read the rest

As for the event log/viewer , I didnot find anything out of the ordinary (other then a few application errors here and there)

Tom

 

if you had XP pro, you could enable process auditing to see whats doin.

Otherwise, a perfmon log capturing process object would show you the name of the process.

I'm guessing you don't know how to do perfmon, so i wrote a little utility set for you. See attached:

Download the zip file, and extract to c:\
open a CMD prompt
type: cd\
type: foo

Then dont mess with your computer. This will churn in the dos window for a while, then when the mystery process runs, it will stop. You will have some output on the screen that looks like this:

In my example, we can see that IEXPLORE.EXE was launched by EXPLORER.EXE (by looking at the PID and parent PID).

Once we have that information, we'll know what do to.

PS: if that attachement prompts you to save ATTACHMENT.PHP just save it as PAUDIT.ZIP and open it in winzip

 

did it work?