Does This Sound Like Malware?

I'm trying to help out a friend (again). The PC is running Vista and it's acting pretty weird. It runs very slowly, and when you can finally get Task Manager up it shows that CPU utilization is high, anywhere between 25 and 100%, although it usually hangs around 50%. It does settle down eventually.

Clicking on show processes for all users doesn't work so you can't see what's tying it up. Running a tasklist from the command prompt shows a lot more but I can't see anything obviously wrong there and can't tell what's using all the CPU time.

The PC can't get an IP address from the DHCP server (router), and it just defaults to a 169 address, although it does pick up the DNS settings for some reason. If you do an ipconfig/renew it says the RPC server is not running. If you go into network connections it is empty, no adapters present. Many different functions will cause a response of some service or other isn't running.

I ran a Malwarebytes scan in safe mode, but with some older definitions that happened to already be on the PC. It said it found two trojans and removed them but that didn't change anything. A subsequent scan came up clean.

Anyway, I'm just wondering if that sounds like malware behavior or if the PC is just messed up and Windows needs to be repaired/reinstalled. I downloaded all the recommended tools in your readme thread and will try them later, but I have a feeling they won't run. My guess my thumb drive won't work either, but I'll see what happens.

Thank you.

 

Well, I just ended up doing a system restore and that took care of it. Nothing would work, couldn't get the USB stick or anything else to work. I think it was malware because the guy told me he clicked on some popup and then everything went to hell in a handbasket. I had to go back about three weeks because even 10 days back didn't change anything. Thanks for your response though.