13 year old nephew visited... now everythings a mess.

Hello, This is a first time post. I'm in a major jam, so I'm looking to you guys for help. We had tons of family in town and I stupidly let my nieces and nephews have free reign with the computer. Well needless to say, after deleting all the porn files I could find that were apparently the product of some secret late-night surfing, I still have big problems. msconfig won't open (flashes and then goes dead), same with Spybot Search & Destroy. Then I downloaded the trial version of Norton Antivirus, and it also will not open. I ran the symantec W32. worm removal tool (which I apparently had), and now my desktop is that white screen and when I click "Restore Active Desktop", it opens the c:\windows\WEB window and won't let me do anything else. I have unistalled Spybot and Norton. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

 

porn! wtf...13 year olds???

 

Honestly, stuffing a mag between the mattresses seems nostalgic. BTW still on Win 98

 

Oddlly enough, when I went to the http://housecall... link, the "scan" button is greyed and won't let me click it. And, on the www.pandasoftware link, I click the "scan your pc" button and nothing happens.

 

Hi there, Thanks so much for your help. I've run through the tutorial and the good news is I can now run Spybot again. The bad news is I can't run the Housecall or Panda virus scanner, and when I went to Microsoft to make sure I had the updated version of windows, the windows update page was blank! Also, I still can't restore my active desktop. Is all hope lost? Thanks again for any help.

 

yep believe it or not....they start very young these days

 

Audiogirl,

I noticed you are using Windows 98, when you go to Microsoft Update does the page actually finish loading and is blank, or is the page loading and just hanging there (hourglass).

Also, are you having trouble accessing links or shortcuts, are there some links you click on and nothing happens?

Steve

 

It is just blank and "Done"

 

make sure your accessing it through IE.

 

P.S. Shortcuts and links seem to be ok after running through your tutorial. I find it wierd that this is affecting web pages... housecall, panda, and microsoft (and probably more).

 

Yes, IE is the only installed browser

 

Hey guys... when I typed in notepad c:\windows\hosts it said file doesn't exist would you like to create one? I unfortunately said yes and so when I typed it in the run box again it just brought up that blank page in notepad. I feel like I'm wasting you guys' time with my XL problem, but if you don't mind I'll explain what happened in the last few hours. Things seemed to be going along fine, then the entire thing crashed and would not reopen at all. The error message was "problem with explorer.exe you must re-install windows". When I somehow got it into safe mode, it wouldn't even recognize the d: drive and there was no internet connection at all. So I got into command prompt and did a system restore to yesterday. I once again can't run spybot, windows update is blank and can't restore active desktop so it looks like I'll have to go through your list again. At least I can get online now!

Sun Java is checked in internet options. Sites aren't on restricted list. I think I'll have to re-install windows. (Should just buy XP but do not have the cash right now and can't make any cash without the computer... you know how it is) If you can spare a few more nuggets of knowledge it is HUGELY appriciated!!!

 

If you're at the c:/ prompt in msdos mode and type "scanreg /restore" it shows you the last few days and you can restore from there. Definately is Windows 98 SE.

 

Audiogirl,

I think you should try the mcrepair tool here, http://download.microsoft.com/download/msninvestor/patch/1.0/win98/en-us/mcrepair.exe

It is a program that repairs several things in IE, just download and run it, be sure to answer Yes to everything (that is very important) until it is finished, then restart your computer and see if you can access Windows Update or Housecall.

You can read the Microsoft Article here, http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=836929 scroll down to Method # 3, Item #3 and it explains the process.

Hopefully, this will work for you and solve one of your problems.

Steve

 

Thank you Steve, I'll try that now!

 

I thought you had Windows 98. Steve

 

Yes, I do have Windows 98. I ran that mcrepair and also found the "unofficial Windows 98 Service Pack" here on Major Geeks, and those seem to have helped alot on the more bizzare problems (windowsupdate.microsoft.com now opens normally and my active desktop is back to normal) Only trouble still is that none of the spyware or anti-virus programs will open (AVG 6.0, Ad-Aware, Spybot Search & Destroy). The only one that will open is Trojan Remover, which found "I-worm/bagel.n" . It tried to re-name the file (c:windows\system\winupd.exe) but could not, and I could not manually either. I ran it again and checked "prevent this program from running by removing it's reference" and it has asked me to re-boot. I'm going to do that now.

 

Sorry about that!

 

Agree, it can cause problems. Still would like to see if she can run Housecall. Steve

 

Housecall and Panda still don't run. I tried re-installing ccleaner, and it won't open even after re-install. I'd love to disable Active Desktop... not sure how though. Thanks again guys for spending your time with this.

 

Right-click somewhere on your desktop and point to Active Desktop, if it's checked, just left-click to return to the normal desktop.

 

Aha! Thank you. Getting late here on the East Coast and my brain is toast. (sounds like a song lyric). I'll be back at it in the AM! Thanks again

 

Try getting all your updates in the morning, restart, and try Housecall again. Your making progress. Steve

 

Well, here we are the next day and any progress I made seems ot have somehow been wrecked, probably by me trying to fix things at this point. There is no functioning Java and I can't get it to install or unintall or anything, pretty much every program I click says "this has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" (some are xaupdate, rundll32, run, runonce, scanregw and MORE), message that c:/windows/winaspi.dll is missing and to get it from windows setup on the disk, dblbuff.sys is missing or corrupted and not even a word document will open. I can still get online though! I think I'm giving up. Can I buy and download a version of Windows XP online (nope... would probably need Java for that) and install it over this mess? :\