Help me guys, I'm having a pretty bad Windows Problem - Fixed

[titanmiller]

I first noticed it when I tried to open the task manager by using Ctrl + Alt + Del and nothing happened, I restarted the computer and when it was closing down it brought up a end task box for taskman.exe - it had been running but It would not show. I restarted and the task manager came up fine, but when I tried several minutes later it would not show. I then noticed that I cannot browse the file system from any Open/Save dialogue box.
I cannot think of anything I have done in the past week or more that would possibly cause this. I was going to do a system restore, but I created a restore point so that I could return (which I JUST realized it would do automatically) to how it was and it erased all of the restore points before that, so I could not restore back.
I dont know what I am going to do, all I can think of is putting in the XP disk and trying to do a non-destructive repair, but I dont really know how to do this.
All of my files are backed up, but I REALLY do not want to have to reinstall everything, let alon the loss in production.

BTW, this computer hosts my SetiQueue (to bring it OncTopic)

Please suggest anything you can think of, are there any log files that will tell what changes have been made so I can try to un do them?


Thanks so much!
-Titan


Link 1
Link 2 Do these pages look like what I want to do?

 

[Smoke]

bump for some help

 

[lobadobadingdong]

a better way would be to hit <F8> on startup to select the command prompt login (or repair console from the XP cd if it won't let you into safe mode command prompt)

at the C: prompt type in "chkdsk /r<enter>" this will fix any file corruption and will likely restore your system to health.

most of the time this happens due to corruption in the index databases, and most of the time is easy to repair with chkdsk.

Cheers,
Doug

 

[CowboyTA]

Go to Control Panel then Administrative Tools then Event Viewer and the logs will be in there.
Make Certain that your AV software is up to date and has done a recent full scan and download and run lavasoft Ad-Aware.

Feel free to IM me with details or questions after you have done the above.

Cowboy - TA DPAD

 

[titanmiller]

Originally posted by: lobadobadingdong
a better way would be to hit <F8> on startup to select the command prompt login (or repair console from the XP cd if it won't let you into safe mode command prompt)

at the C: prompt type in "chkdsk /r<enter>" this will fix any file corruption and will likely restore your system to health.

most of the time this happens due to corruption in the index databases, and most of the time is easy to repair with chkdsk.

Cheers,
Doug

Thanks a ton for the reply!

I just shut the computer clear off, and started it back up. So far it is working perfect, but as my first post says this is how it acts, it works, then it doesnt. I just hope that for some weard reason it continues to work.

I'll keep you posted.

 

[titanmiller]

Originally posted by: CowboyTA
Go to Control Panel then Administrative Tools then Event Viewer and the logs will be in there.
Make Certain that your AV software is up to date and has done a recent full scan and download and run lavasoft Ad-Aware.

Feel free to IM me with details or questions after you have done the above.

Cowboy - TA DPAD

Thanks! I looked through there, but nothing really stood out to me (not that I really knew what I was looking for)
I'm pretty sure that it is not virus or spyware related and I have rand both my AV and Ad-Aware in the past 24 hours.

So far so good though - uptime 13 minutes.

 

[soni]

Check the RAM with memtest86 (+)

I had something like this happening to me, BAD ram

 

[titanmiller]

Well, over 1 hour now and all is still good. The strange thing is I did nothing but shut it off and then start it. Is there a difference between an actual shutdown and just a restart.

Soni - possibly a simple restart keeps power to the RAM therefore not allowing any hardware problem to sort itself out, but the full shutdown allowed it to start from a brand new state. ????

I think that is the first time I have pressed the power button on this computer in 6 months.


I hope it keeps going!

 

[Coquito]

Hopefully that was all it needed. Best of luck.

 

[Soggysocks]

HAve you done a disk clean and/or defrag?

 

[Smoke]

Soggy's comment made me think, "Did you check for dust, dirt, rodents, and snakes?! :Q

I'll never forget that picture that circulated around a while back with that snake hanging out of the PS "fried". yikes!

 

[Coquito]

Originally posted by: Smoke
Soggy's comment made me think, "Did you check for dust, dirt, rodents, and snakes?! :Q

I'll never forget that picture that circulated around a while back with that snake hanging out of the PS "fried". yikes!

a kind enough member providing a pic in 3...2...1...

 

[Coquito]

ehh, i couldn't wait, so i looked myself.

Looks PSed to me.

 

[SNC]

If rebooting it fixed the problem it could be a failing cap on the main board or in the powersupply.
Look over the caps good.

 

[titanmiller]

Well, my case is very dusty, and it has spider webs in it:Q I guess there could be some correlation between the two. I really need to blow it out.
As for defrag, I havent done one in a long time on this computer because........I dont want to turn off seti to do it. I have not done disk clean because when I try to run it it does nothing and when you check the task manager there is a process named cleanmgr.exe that is taking 100% processor time. I guess I could try now since my other problem is fixed.

Current up-time = 4:30 and still running. I sure feel better now.

 

[lobadobadingdong]

Originally posted by: titanmiller
Well, my case is very dusty, and it has spider webs in it:Q I guess there could be some correlation between the two. I really need to blow it out.
As for defrag, I havent done one in a long time on this computer because........I dont want to turn off seti to do it. I have not done disk clean because when I try to run it it does nothing and when you check the task manager there is a process named cleanmgr.exe that is taking 100% processor time. I guess I could try now since my other problem is fixed.

Current up-time = 4:30 and still running. I sure feel better now.

I leave seti running when I defrag (defrag only uses max 6% processor time....and glad to see I helped you get a cruncher back into production

depending on how big of a page file you use defragging it will lower you time to complete each WU

if it's XP pro (only works on XP pro) do a start > run and key in "Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks" without the " " and it will optimize(a kind of defrag, it moves the startup files to the begining of the drive and sorts them in order that they are called by the log of your last startup in the registry) your start files to drastically reduce your systems start up time.

 

[titanmiller]

Well, I got it working but then I activated Active desktop and it came back. I'm pretty sure that has something to do with it because it started to happen after I enabled Active desktop. I guess I'll just leave it alone.

 

[Allio]

This sounds like something that happened to me... similar, anyway. I'd start up and nothing would work - just clicking on the start menu would pretty much freeze it. If you managed to bring up the tasklist, the username that is normally next to all the processes wasn't there. I used to have to do a system restore every time I started up to fix it, but eventually I realised that it sorted itself out if I left it alone for about three minutes, so I just left it.

Then a while ago it stopped happening, and I never could figure out why. If you realise exactly what it was that was causing it, let me know, because I'd like to stop it happening again. Activedesktop sounds like a likely culprit, though.

 

[titanmiller]

Allio, Your problem shounds like one that I have had before, but if I remember correctly it only affected network connections' ability to function for the first few minutes.

From my analysis it does seem like Active Desktop is the cause, which is too bad because I would like to be able to use it.


It's doubtful that any of you could reproduce this problem but if you are willing to try I would like to hear your results. I had a 417KB Jpeg image and CoolKids realtime SetiStats page.

If this is reproducable, then shame on Microsoft for letting something like this happen.