Everything has encountered a problem and needs to close

[RandomFool]

Alright so a friend of mine has a proble where almost everything he tries to do that ends up causing a "XXXX has encountered a problem and needs to close" IE, Outlook, system restore, norton antivirus etc. I got him to run Adaware and it got rid of 1200 something entries but it stilll didn't fix the problem. I'm heading over there later to take a look at it. Any ideas of what this could be. My best guess is a either a corrupt windows file or a virus. Thanks

-Ryan

 

[jackschmittusa]

Time to reformat.

 

[montag451]

:brokenheart:

 

[daveybrat]

1200 is a LOT of spyware for Adaware to find. If he has that much with just one antispyware program, then it's time for a format.

 

[imported_nocturne]

As stated previously, if somebody had that much spyware (let alone 10% that much) the probability of it even being bootable is debatable.

A mandatory reformat is definately called for. Just try to recover what files you can, and wipe it clean. Even if I get a mild virus or worm, I would reformat anyways just to be safe (for the record, in ten years I've only had the blaster worm once).

 

[montag451]

Also, obviously, be very careful about which files you back up.
Make sure you put them into one folder on the hard drive, then you can scan them over and over again with ease - before you let them out to be free in the big wide hard drive.

 

[RandomFool]

I took care of it... It turns out Norton was screwing everything up, I removed it well kinda system works uninstalled fine but internet security won't run the whole setup. I replaced it with mcafee and it's working for now. I'm trying to avoid formatting because it takes soooo long to set everything up agian and in about a week it'll be filled with crap again.