wierdest problem i've run across yet

Alright. So here's what's happening. I have only noticed it in iexplorer so far.. but what happens is iexplorer spontaneously de-selects itself..... as in, it is not the current application.. as is... the very top bar turns to gray as opposed to blue... It also so happens that this is by far the single most irritating problem known to the history of man. It happens every 2 seconds or so. For example.. to type this i've had to click my mouse on the webpage about a billi9on f*&*&king times to get iexplorer to be the front app. Please help me. I have no idea where to begin.

windows xp
nvidia geforce 4600ti
athlon xp 2600+
wd 40 & 20 gb hdd's
lite on 32x
512mb generic rams

 

actually all the apps are doing it... just randomly de-selecting themselves.... nothing becomes active.. they all just go inactive......
WHY!!!!!

 

I think I had something like this one time on my last PC - I had one of those pop-ups with no window, hard to explain but it kept appearing (invisibly!) and making all my other apps go to the background. Try looking at Task Manager when the problem occurs & see if there's any extra IE windows that shouldn't be there, and do a virus / trojan scan.

 

I would definately check for viruses. Use your virus scanner to create and emergency virus scanning disk. Norton and Mcafee both do this, they create a disk, or set of disks to boot up with and perform a memory scan HD scan and boot sector scan. if nothing is found I would then Download spybot S&D and use it and then ad-aware and use it to scan for addware spyware and malware. they are both free and can be gotten here at MG links provided below. try all this and post back with your findings. Good luck to you!

Spybot Search & Destroy
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download2471.html

Ad-Aware SE
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download506.html

 

do you have an enabled firewall on, other than the one supplied with windows?

 

Do you have Norton's Anti-virus? Also, do a search and see if you have anything called SecondThought or Stcloader.exe.

Sometimes adware can cause these symptoms. Let us know before doing anything.

Steve

 

mcadam88- no

matacumbie- no


Ok, yes it is virus related.. (aren't all computer problems these days..). This one's pretty tricky though. So far I've followed all the instructions in the big sticky in the virus forum.. This includes downloading the billion programs. (aboutbuster, ad-aware,bazooka,ccleaner,cwshredder,kill2me,spybot S&D, spywareblaster, stinger,hsremove). i've run them all in normal mode and safe mode, i have system restore turned off. so on and so forth. I could try what was mentioned above.. with the disks and what not.. do you guys/girls think this would be beneficial?

Oh yeah, the virus is getting picked up by avg. The file is "istactivex.dll". I can remove it.. or i can take actions that appear to remove it.. but either at reboot. or some other time. it re-appears. and susequently so do the gay porn ads. Any suggestions?

 

Sounds like a memory resident virus. Hence why it reappears after rebooting. The virus copies itself into your RAM and when you shutdown, re-writes itself to the hard drive. AVG is removing the copy on your hard drive that just gets put back at shutdown. As I mentioned before, using an emergency virus scan bootdisk set will scan for memory residents and remove them, as well as MBR (master boot record) viruses and also viruses on the hard drive. Best and safest bet if you ask me.

 

Have a look here, http://www.pestpatrol.com/PestInfo/t/trojandownloader_win32_istbar_dc.asp#Operation

The manual removal is at the bottom.

Steve