SLOW loading apps, have tried AV's, antispyware, your steps, still slow

Hello!!!! So glad to have found this forum.

All my apps have been loading extremely slowly - several minutes, including FireFox, IE, Outlook Express, Quicken, Bitdefender, pretty much all of them. Clicking on Start/Programs is also a long wait to just see the program list... It's getting really frustrating. Windows itself doesn't take that long to come up, comparatively, but it's still kinda slow.

My specs. HP Pavilion ze5400, 2.65 GHz Pentium 4, 960 MB RAM, 80 GB HD (36 Free), Windows XP Home SP2 (purchased 12/03)

I tried contacting HP for help, but they were pretty quick to advise me to use my Windows Recovery CD to repair my OS. (They had given be the list of to do's, like check for viruses and spyware, which I did.) I was also getting fairly frequent blue screen errors which seemed to be caused by a device. I completely removed the 2 devices that I had added (with their drivers): Creative Soundblaster Live and WinTV by Haupaugge. Haven't had one of those since for a couple days - hopefully that is fixed. I'd rather try to clean my laptop up to see if that helps before reinstall/repair of Windows XP (Home SP2).

I followed the RUN AND READ ME FIRST sticky - but before that I had run Bitdefender 9, and Spybot which identified JS.Blackworm.A, Win32.Netsky.C@mm, adware.bho.sidestep.A.1, adware.sidestep.F. First two cleaned, but can't seem to get rid of SideStep. Bitdefender also ID'd Trojan.Patched.B (DLMCleaner.exe), but isn't that a part of Adobe Reader? I couldn't download a couple pdfs after that was in quarantine. I emptied quarantine before proceding.

The Major Geek steps:
In Safe Mode Ran:
CCleaner
Windows Malicious Software Removal
Ad Aware
Spybot S&D (w/ immunize)- found and fixed SideStep BHO
Windows Defender

Reconnected to internet in safe mode:
Bitdefender - found DLMCleaner.exe again, called Trojan.Patched.B = allowed to clean
Panda Active Scan

Computer still slow:
Tried alternative scans:
SpySweeper - could not install - error: C:\Windows\libeay32.dll = in use by other process
Ewido AntiSpyware and TrojanScan - stopped after about 8 hours, getting more frustrated....

Attached are the requested Bitdefender and Panda logs as well as a HJT log.

Anyone want to try to tackle this with me???? I'd be very appreciative!!!

Thanks

 

Have you tried to defrag your harddrive?
Right click on harddrive>properties>Tools>defrag now

just wanted to make sure you know how, not trying to say you don't.

Also try cleaning out the startup files.
run>msconfig>startup
just be careful you don't remove something you need.

last of all check your processes that are running under task manager. End anything suspicious.

Hope this helps.

 

Yes, thanks. I did defrag the HD recently and have looked at startup processes. I took out the things I know I didn't need, like Quicken reminders, media player processes.
Still unbelievably slow.

 

Wow that's really wierd. Has anything recently changed or been installed? What is your memory usage at on your system?

 

How do I check memory usage?

 

on win XP hit Ctrl + Alt + Del and click performance tab for basic info

 

Not sure what the key info needed is but here are the #s.

Handles 9593
Threads 433
Processes 47
Physical Memory
-Total 982000
-Available 439080
-System cache 589064
Kernel Memory
-Total 75168
-Paged 58592
-Nonpaged 16580
Commit Charge
-Total 432352
-Limit 2369136
-Peak 490768

 

Everything does look good in your task manager so maybe you should try going to the malware section.

Another thing to check is in your task manager under the processes tab, sort by image name and then look for a process that says IExplorer.exe

make sure you don't have your computer connected to the internet though.
if you see this it is a tell tale sign that you have malware on your pc.

 

I would follow these instructions to tweak your system for performance. This includes a trip to the malware thread. This covers every software tweak I could think of, so if you're not satisfied after that, then you should consider a hardware upgrade, or at least follow the instructions in the Overclocking Guide.

 

I did do all the RUN AND READ ME FIRST things exactly - in first post. Resulting logs attached to that post. Do I really need to do them again? It took several days because many of the scans and app loading took soooo long! Ouch. This laptop was not always like this - it was pretty snappy until a few months ago.

I will try the tweaks Mada suggested.

 

Should this thread be moved to malware? (I debated before posting here - cause I thought I had removed the bad stuff I found.)