Can't access control panel

God what a morning! I am browsing when suddenly my mouse arrow freezes. I go through every key to see if a key will help--nothing. I turn the machine off. When it restarts there is this on the screen: "Bootblock emergency recovery mode. The system flash rom image may be corrupted or the esc key was pressed during power on. If the esc key was accidentally pressed reboot the system." below that it says "please insert a ROMPaq diskette into drive A and cycle the power on the system." Sooo...after rebooting, to no avail, I call around for the diskette requested. The guy I talk to advises me to look for a button below the battery inside the machine, which i do. I follow his instruction of holding it down for 6 seconds. I reboot. Same message. He then suggests that a key on the keyboard is jammed. I happen to have a new keyboard handy so I power down, unplug everything, affix the new keyboards, and power up. There's a new screen requesting me to hit F1. Nothing. I power down/up again. I hit F1...I CAN BROWSE! Soooo...I'm browsing away when all the sudden one of those viruses pretending to be virus protection pops up, pops up again, etc. This one pretends to be from Windows itself. Then my Adaware kicks in on it's own. After a scan, it quarantines the problem malware. Fine. I reboot, and then check my control panel. I can't access anything in it. I can't access help. The error message is "application not found ". I can browse, but, via pop-up, it wants me to choose which program I want to execute the action with. Obviously I choose my browser, Firefox. Pop-up says action not found. I hit "OK ", then it shows me another pop-up: you have chosen to open firefox.exe would you like to save. It hasn't mattered whether I hit save or not. The box goes away and a blank firefox is there. All that is visible is my bars, thus I can browse. I've spent about 5 or 6 hours on this today. I am going to look into doing a system restore, and perhaps remove adaware after running a full scan. Those seem to be my only options. Thus far I haven't had any luck getting system restore to function. I get a pop-up "application not found ".

 

I just tried accessing system restore via run. It wants to know what program I want to use system restore with. None of the programs listed seem appropriate. I can no longer get Adaware to work either.

 

Thanks. I'll give that a shot.

I also realized that, after running Adaware, then rebooting, I saw the internet explorer option at the top of my start menu. I thought it looked funny (as did the phony windows pop-ups that were viruses), so I deleted it from the top of start menu. It appears to be in "all programs ", but does not want to run. I tried updating it, sending error reports, and downloading a new version of it. I do not know what XP I have though.

 

I already have Malwarebyte, but I downloaded again. I won't open up. It sends a pop up asking me what program I want to open up the program with. I tried opening it with itself, and with firefox.

 

Well, I went to the other accounts on the comp, and found one to be an administrator. I did a system restore, came back to this account, and found it to be running fine (so far). Moral of the story: always have two administrator accounts. Oh yeah! Also use paragraphs when typing on Windows BBS (that's what the site administrator told me in a private message).

 

So far, it's running great. I don't have the Windows CD, but I could get it from the tech that upgraded the system.

Wouldn't a virus corrupt the computer as a whole? Why would one administrator account be OK, and the other tainted? Perhaps in time all the accounts would have been infected.

You may be right. The entirety of the problems I experience may have been viral issues. One thing I didn't mention: the day before yesterday when I came home, the computer had some aspect of Word that I've never seen on the desktop. It appeared to be an outlay of what Word has to offer, and how to use the various features. I Xed it away, not thinking too much about how it got there. The ext morning it was problemzilla.

The only thing I did differently the previous day was chat with Microsoft on a pop-up PM hahaha. Later that day I had a virus? Hmmm...nah... No reason to go conspiracy! They would stand to make money off me having a computer since I was inquiring about an online CRM course. I would guess viruses come from malicious teens or people who stand to make money from removing them. Effort goes into the creation of viruses. Effort without pay?

Thanks for responding!

 

Next time. I feel as though the problem has been solved, though I don't doubt that some malware exists in my comp. I won't get into that now. Thanks for the HTML lesson.