All Programs shutting down . . .

My sister's 1-year old Dell has a major problem for the past week. Every application used will cause an error and then shut down:
"msbb has encountered a problem and will now close. "
"MS Outlook has encountered a problem and will now close. "
"Windows has encountered a problem and will now close. "
"Internet Explorer has encountered a problem . . . "
"MS Word has encountered a problem and . . . ".
There aren't any error codes displayed, nor programs listed as "not responding ".

Spybot & Norton AV scans didn't clean out the bug or find anything new. She regularly downloads patches from MS, and keeps Norton AV updated. The HDD is regularly defragged. XP firewall is on. MSBlaster 'might' have infected the machine in August, their DSL company sent them the fix and the machine worked fine until a week ago.

She has been on the phone for two days with Microsoft techs who couldn't find the problem and finally had her reinstall XP(HE), a 'dirty install' over the existing XP(HE). Now the machine takes ~6 minutes to boot and then works very slowly, and still shuts down IE, email, Word, and any other program after a few minutes use.

Her two teenage sons download lots of A/V files and 'stuff', but her installed programs in the "Add/Remove Programs" list doesn't have anything suspicious. I asked her to get rid of Kazaa and download the 'Lite' version.

This isn't much information to go on, sorry, has anyone run into this before or have ideas on how to do a long-distance fix?

Win XP Home Edition, IE 6, Outlook email on a 1yr-old Dell machine.

 

Hello RexB


Given all the problems decribed, I would do a clean reinstall. This system is broken, plain and simple. The clean reinstall would solve all these problems, take less time than trying to fix, and eliminate any lurking "bombs "

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sg_clean.asp is a good site to get instructions on how to reinstall XP.

Reagrds - Charles

 

Yeh, I'm thinking the same thing, but (there's always a but, eh?) she's gonna have to hire someone to clean install, that's the way it goes. I've tried coaching over the phone, but the translation soon got lost . . . I'll direct her to that site, and anandtech, etc, but the box crashes after a few minutes online.
Thanks

 

Hi Rex
Make sure your sister has backed up all her files first before she has anything drastic done to her computer. If this is not possible due to all the programs shutting down then at least make sure that who ever she gets to do the work for her backs them up for her. There's nothing worse than loosing all your work in one go. One good way to save everything in one go is to either have a cdrw to put things on disk or to have a memory stick that fits in to a usb port and takes the place of many floppies. I have both and use both. (havnt wiped of all my floppies either just to be on the very very very safe side) over cautious due to my own problems a few months ago and thanked god i had saved most. only lost a couple of weeks work.