Media player misbehaving - malware?

Fishhead · Dec 5, 2006

Last night my son asked me to look at his computer. It runs XP home and MS media player 9. He and his friends download and play all sorts of video clips. When he starts to play a video using MS Media player the clip starts and shows the begining few seconds of video and the video cuts-out to a black sceen; however, the audio continues playing. If the same clip is immediately replayed, all of the sound is there, but no video, even though the first time it did play for a few seconds. Close the media play and restart it and try playing the clip, it will show the video for a few seconds and then go black. There are no error messages given.

I loaded one of his clips into the MS movie maker and the clip will play fine all the way through.

I ran hijack this, mcafee, spybot search and destroy, ad-Adware and could see nothing unsusal. This would appear to be some sort of malware to me, but I can not identify what it is or what is going on. Any help would be appreciated.

chaslang · Dec 6, 2006

Actually it does not really sound like malware. It sounds more like something related to Windows Media Player is broken. Have you tried checking out other video clips in Windows Media Player. Like clips from other websites that are maybe more reliable sources and that do not use any strange codecs. If your son & friends downloaded any codecs to watch various clips that may have downloaded some malware. There are close to a dozen rogue codec downloads that install a variety of malware on to systems. However your describe problem does not fit the symptom of these rogues.

If you really still suspect malware and want to do a malware check, then follow the steps below. Otherwise I would uninstall Windows Media Player, reboot, and then reinstall and if that does not help, post in the Software Forum.

Malware Scanning Requirements

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Run ALL the steps in this Sticky thread READ & RUN ME FIRST Before Asking for Support

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After doing ALL of the above you still have a problem make sure you have booted to normal mode and run the steps in the below link to properly use HijackThis and attach a log:

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When you return to make your next post, make sure you attach the following logs and that you have run these scans in the following order too:

CounterSpy

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Panda Scan - from step 6

runkeys.txt - the log from GetRunKey.bat

newfiles.txt - the log from ShowNew.bat

HijackThis

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Media player misbehaving - malware?

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chaslang MajorGeeks Admin - Master Malware Expert Staff Member