Windows services keep disabling themselves

Hi everyone! I'm hoping that someone here can shed some light on this problem that I'm having. Here's some background info on what's happening.

IBM R31 thinkpad
WinXP Home

A friend told me that he wanted me to look at his laptop for him because he couldn't get any sound. Booted up, went into Device Manager, and NOTHING WAS THERE!!! It was all blank! I installed CleanUp 4.0 and ran it. Then installed Adaware, and ran it. Then ran HijackThis! and ran it. Adaware found around 100 or so instances of spyware, all of which were removed without problems. HijackThis found some bad entries as well. Nothing too bad at this point. Seemed pretty normal. I installed AVG, and ran it. It found 4 viruses in the System Restore folder. AVG was able to delete the viruses. I disabled System Restore after this just to make sure everything was gone.

But still, even after all this, Device Manager was still as blank as the look on my face. Some investigating online came up with the Plug and Play service in Windows was disabled and that is needed to make things like the Device Manager operate properly. So I go and click Start -> Run -> "services.msc" and it brings up the services. Well, lo and behold, I scroll through the list of services and EVERYTHING IS DISABLED (with the exception of AVG, and two RPC services). I broke out my other laptop to get the list of which services should be Automatic/Manual/etc. and set all of the services as they should be. Rebooted the machine, everything came up nicely. Everything seemed peachy!

Until I rebooted again. And I realized that all of the services had AGAIN been disabled! Everything with the excpection of AVG and the two RPC services! I have been racking my brain all night trying to figure this out! There are no more viruses on there according to AVG. There is no spyware according to Adaware. And HijackThis reports nothing out of the ordinary! Someone have a clue?

Thanks

Scott

 

Did you run all that from 'Safe Mode'?

 

I ran adaware, cleanup and hijackthis from safe mode at first. Then ran them again in windows. I didn't run AVG from safe mode.

 

Do that and these also from 'safe mode with networking support'.
Trend Micro's Free Online Virus Scan
Symantec Security Check
McAfee AVERT Stinger

 

Will do. I'll post up what comes of it. Thanks!