Peculiar problem on start-up

My wife and I share a home office, and each have a computer on our desks. A week or so she began to have this problem (which I will detail, below) and my computer just showed it for the first time.

Her first sign, and the one I just noticed was an error message on boot-up which said, "The Norton anti-virus auto-protect could not be loaded. Your system is not protected from viruses. Please restart your computer" which we did, only to again get6 the same message. The Norton Icon in the tray had a red line through it, indicating it was turned off, yet when we ignored the reboot advice and clicked the Norton Icon, the program came up on screen and indicated that all features were running.

AMicrosoft error message then came up which said, "The system has recovered from a serious error. A log has been created. Please tell Microsoft.

A message then came up in response to my request which said: "The error report will contain:
C:\docume~owner\locals~1\temp\wer8681.dir00\mini112305-01dmp
C:\docume~owner\locals~1\temp\wer8681.dir00\sysdataxml"

I have no idea what all of this means, but my wifes computer became more and more difficult to start and ran more slowly, and finally today, could not be booted up at all. A message arrived saying there was (words to the effect) a hard drive error that prevented a proper use of Windows XP.

I took her computer to a shop for repairs this afternoon, and when I came home, my computer did as described in the above paragraphs. (They have not as yet looked into her computer)

Could this be some form of virus? (we do exchange eMail between us)
Any suggestions as to what I should do at this point?

bill conklin

 

Download another virus program. (try www.avast.com or free.grisoft.com), do a full scan as soon as possible.

I suppose you already thought of that. Press ctrl+alt+dlt and look at your running processes, if there's any that look slightly dodgy, google them, then remove them when you are sure it's bad.

Backup all your valuable data now incase this is severe and you have to reinstall windows.

 

Hi Bill,

Try the steps in the Symantec link below. See if it solves the NAV issues you described. It might stop the other errors also.

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPOR...65256c54000fdcc3?OpenDocument&src=bar_sch_nam

Let us know.

Steve

 

Post this: ---> C:\docume~owner\locals~1\temp\wer8681.dir00\mini112305-01dmp as an attachment. This MAY help us figure this out.

But, I bet, Matacumbie's (Do not ever type in Metacrumbie ), answer is the best.