Computer Restarts When Connected to Ethernet

[Odysseus145]

My aunt came to me with an older emachines computer saying it would restart itself after plugging in an ethernet cable. After I booted up the computer (and got over the smell of cigarette smoke emanating from the thing) I confimed this. It restarts shortly after receiving an ip from the home network.

I ran Ad-Aware and AVG and found many MANY infected files and malware. I downloaded and istalled drivers from emachines website. Also, at startup a message pops up saying shell.exe could not be found.

After this it's still restarting. I would do a repair install but i don't have access to an xp home install disc. Any ideas?

 

[mechBgon]

You might remove the hard drive, back up any important files first, then try some malware-removal scanners on the hard drive after slaving it into a different computer. Schadenfroh assembled a malware-removal utility here, maybe give that a try as your opening move.

Also, see if the system has a built-in reimaging partition that you can call up during startup. If it does, you might want to just reimage it back to factory stock, then secure it. Since it evidently needs securing. :evil:

 

[Odysseus145]

That's about what I was afraid of. Oh well, I'll just get them to take it somewhere. Thanks anyway though.