I recently rebuilt my laptop Windows XP Pro from scratch. After a few weeks, the system became unstable after every login and reached a point where I couldn't start any programs, including the Task Manager. I had to do a hard reset to recover.
I started Task Manager as soon as I logged in, and I noticed that a file named wuauclt.exe was running immediately. Concurrent with that, a svchost.exe file would grow exponentially. I did some digging and found out that the wu* file is Windows Update so I shut automatic updates off. The file still loaded.
I could shut the process down, but it restarts every time I log in. I finally deleted the file in the System32 folder, but it keeps coming back and running again. When I looked online at some sites, it seems that my copy of the program is smaller than others report (mine is about 50K, several people mentioned theirs is over 100K).
I did a Registry search, but there are no mentions of the file in there, which is odd. One of the sites I looked at mentioned the possibility of a trojan or a virus of some sort, but I've run AVG Free and A-Squared with no negative results. I also ran an online scanner from someone else with nothing found.
Does anyone have a clue what's happening with this laptop? Any ideas on how to get rid of this without reinstalling again? Thanks in advance.
I started Task Manager as soon as I logged in, and I noticed that a file named wuauclt.exe was running immediately. Concurrent with that, a svchost.exe file would grow exponentially. I did some digging and found out that the wu* file is Windows Update so I shut automatic updates off. The file still loaded.
I could shut the process down, but it restarts every time I log in. I finally deleted the file in the System32 folder, but it keeps coming back and running again. When I looked online at some sites, it seems that my copy of the program is smaller than others report (mine is about 50K, several people mentioned theirs is over 100K).
I did a Registry search, but there are no mentions of the file in there, which is odd. One of the sites I looked at mentioned the possibility of a trojan or a virus of some sort, but I've run AVG Free and A-Squared with no negative results. I also ran an online scanner from someone else with nothing found.
Does anyone have a clue what's happening with this laptop? Any ideas on how to get rid of this without reinstalling again? Thanks in advance.
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