Everything is going to hell (things randomly stop working)

[Inimical]

I'm really baffled about what's going on with my computer. A few weeks ago, my lone hard drive (I had a second, but it crashed), started making overly loud noises, and around the same time, a few things stopped working. For example, I couldn't join any Internet quake3 game without windows crashing, and the All-Seeing Eye program would stop working after a day or two. I re-installed that program maybe 10 times. And when I say stopped working, I mean I'd get one of those generic dialogs, like, "Windows has encountered a problem with the All-Seeing Eye and had to shut it down," whenever I clicked on the .exe to start it OR the file to install it. I'd get a similar message upon actually joining a quake3 game, but then I would get a BSOD and I'd have to reboot.

Well, I decided I should get a new hard drive, and I did. I got a western digital 80gb, 8mb cache, 7200 rpm drive to replace my old 7200 drive, and I reinstalled windows on it. I then reinstalled quake3 and the all-seeing eye and tried to join a game. But I had the exact same problem. An error message and then a BSOD. More recently, I installed Grim Fandango on this new hard drive (I did that yesterday, actually) but I encountered the exact same problem. Now, just one day later, I can't start up the game. Just a generic error message, and it closes. Does anybody have any idea what could be causing these problems? Here's what I'm using in my computer:

Windows XP pro Service Pack 1
Radeon 9500 pro
768 megs of pc2100 RAM
Athlon XP 1800+ (not overclocked at all)
Soundblaster live 5.1
EPoX 8RDA+ nforce2 motherboard
The Western Digital hard drive previously mentioned
A maxtor 120gb, 5400rpm drive (the one that's making the loud read/write noises)

I think that's just about everything that could be important. If you need to know any more, I'd be glad to tell you. I'm pretty sure the drivers are updated for everything. I really hope someone out there can help me out.

 

[emjem]

Having a defective hard drive in the system can cause strange things. Try disconnecting it and see how it goes.

Next on my list would be ram problems. If taking down the bad hdd doesn't fix your problem try pulling and reseating the ram. If that doesn't cure it then try running memtest to see if you get errors.

 

[Inimical]

Well, it seems like I might've been making a lot out of nothing. Stupidly, I hadn't put any anti-virus software on this new hard drive and new install of windows, but when I swapped the hard drive into my brother's computer, Norton went wild. Apparently I had a virus called PINF, or something like that. A very slow spreading, .exe infecting virus.

I let the scan go on my brother's computer, and it found about 210 instances of it. Unfortunately, it seems like the files that were repaired no longer function, but I hope that they won't stop working again after I'm all done with this.

 

[amdskip]

Try removing the sound blaster live for kicks. Sometimes these cards can really screw a system over.