HELP- weird stuff happening in Win2K SP3 - image included "unable to open dialog"

[thirdlegstump]

Getting these two never seen before windows that are labelled 'update' with a 'status' window within it. I just installed a new fresh legit OEM copy of Windows 2000 Pro with SP 3 and as my computer starts up and windows load, they pop up with the error "Unable to open dialog." I recently scanned all my drives with AVG and nothing showed up except it did completely trash my Win98 partition. (AVG did)

http://www.ultimateguitarpage.com/about/yoshi/wtf.jpg


If anyone can shed some light on what is going on, I'd greatly appreciate it.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Sounds like you have something trying to start when windows starts ...

It could possibly be some type of spamware ... you way want to download a program called Adaware to see if that helps ... If it doesnt then be sure to check the following

start menu - programs - startup .. make sure theres nothing there that should not be there

If that is no help, you may need to do some cleaning in the Registry ..

(be carefull doing these steps)
Bring up Regedit

Go to the following path

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
-Software
--Microsoft
---Windows
----CurrentVersion


look in Run ... there will be a list of a bunch of programs that start when windows starts ...
If you see anything that should not be there ... delete it.
in mine I have about a dozen things ...

Also look in RunOnce and RunOnceEx ... check for anything that does not belong

 

[thirdlegstump]

Thanks it really helped.

I think I found the problem..

I went into regedit and noticed that on startup there is a key that starts up explorer.exe from another location rather than the c:\winnt\explorer.exe. It's c:\winnt\system32\explorer.exe and I noticed that it was hidden...something tells me it's some kind of trojan. Anyway I edited the key so that it's back to just winnt\explorer.exe and it no longer comes up. The only thing though is now 'my documents' open up each time I start up the machine UGH!!

Another issue I'm having now is that WMPlayer crashes whenever I click on an .mpg link. Mp3's are fine. However when I open the mpg file locally by double clicking, it opens fine. Any takers?