My computer hates me

Not 100% sure if this is the right place for this... but here's the situation.

About a month ago, my computer started doing some weird stuff with the graphics.

It started when I was playing WoW... suddenly the terrain would just disappear and only come back after a complete computer reboot. After that my screen (while in game only) would just freeze. I could move my mouse... but nothing else would work. When I would alt-tab or Ctrl-alt-Del, my desktop would show up (rather slowly) but in the huge resolution and only 16 colors. Weird thing was, while the icons would be huge, the wallpaper would be at regular scale (but only in the crappy 16 color).

On top of all that, I would periodically get blue screened.

I cleared out my folders on the game (everything they suggest on their tech forums) and it seemed to help... but after a week or so, it started doing it again.

I updated my graphics drivers and i thought that fixed it. But today, after about 2 weeks of no problems. My screen froze in game again...

And about 10 min ago (not in game) I was checking email and got blue screened again.

The "technical" stuff at the bottom was:
*** Stop 0x000008E (0xC0000005, 0xBF5CFA56, 0x9624C518, 0x00000000)
*** bravo_n.sys - Address BF5CFA56 base at BF5CF000 Datestamp 43a9081b


So, what can I do? While *most* of the incidents are preceded with me playing WoW, there have been one or two that just happened without me ever starting up the game.

 

Sounds like the video card is went. Do you have a video card installed or onboard? If you have a seperate card you could try uninstalling it and going back to the onboard to see what that does. I doubt contents of the game folder had anything to do with it.

 

This might be helpful:

That wonderful STOP: 0x0000008E (0xC0000005... BSOD appeared on the screen.

(Both machines worked fine till the users "Opened a file they received through msn messenger" http://icrontic.com/forum/images/smilies/banghead.gif )

Safe Mode works fine, just reboots in Normal Mode.

From safe mode cmd prompt only I scanned with F-Prot, Ad-Aware, SpyBot & HijackThis... All things cleaned up or shutoff...
(Norton was on one of the machines but it was not working and you didn't have enough time to check anything in Normal mode.)

Rebooted and within a few minutes... STOP: 0x0000008E again... rebooted in safe mode again shut everything off in MSConfig, ran Rootkit Revealer from sysinternals which found nothing... rebooted and same BSOD again...

Searched Google for 0x0000008E errors and got the standard, "Ram problem, Driver Problem, PS Weak... Tested Ram with memtest, changed the power supply and still no go...

Another site was talking about posting minidumps for them to look at, so I looked into one of the minidumps and found:

Rustock rootkit v 1.2
Z:\NewProjects\spambot\new\driver\objfre\i386\driv er.pdb

A little more Google revealed that this Rootkit, once installed is undetectable by anything, quite the amazing little piece of code...

Symantec's info on the Rustock Rootkit

This was it the B version... I followed the directions on Symantec's site to remove it by booting into recovery console from an XP CD. (You cannot detect it in Safe Mode)

Once there I used "Disable pe386" to shut off the rootkit... I looked while in safe mode for this service and it WAS NOT there... Since it loads with kernel / driver data, it hides everything about itself...

Symantec's Cleanup Instructions...

Rebooted in Normal mode and no more BSOD, reinstalled NAV and started it scanning when I left the shop... I will run ADSSpy again and see if it finds the alternate data stream now...

I realize that this is not the only cause of 0x8e errors but this was my problem, and since there were two machines in the shop with the same problem, I can see more of these coming in for repair...

Hope this helps those who have just recently developed STOP: 0x0000008E errors.

 

yeah, I found that forum when I tried to do a little research on my own. but my computer isn't restarting or shutting down on it's own... It's just the blue screen.


I also have not opened any files I wasn't 100% sure about. (I'm anal about that... I don't even open files from the school unless I know what they are)... So I wouldn't think there was any kind of rootkit magic going on.

But I'll dig around and see what I can find.

Thanks for the replies so far.