XP Pro troubleshooting advice

I've recently been getting some weird activity on my desktop machine running XP Pro.

- In Outlook express, messages will be completely blank both the message itself and the sender / subject area. Sometimes selecting the message will "fill in" the info other times it remains blank.

- In multiple applications as well as the OS, the secondary windows that pop up when your saving / exporting etc, will be blank, or improperly laid out, or missing info/features often with garbled text, or completely sized wrong, often completely off the screen requiring multiple dragging of the window to get to the save/ cancel / feature buttons. This also occurs with the hovering windows you get when the cursor is overtop of features etc...

A restart usually corrects these issues temporarily, and it seams the issue arises when the machine is left idle for 30 minutes plus and I return.

Any advice on potential things to look for would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Chris

 

Just wanted to say thanks, seams like my issues have been resolved.

I have been a user of CCleaner for awhile but had never used the registry or start menu tools I certainly will for now on.

Found a couple known Malware EXE's in the start up menu most likely that was causing the issues.

Thanks again

Chris

 

if that's the case, you should run through the malware removal steps here
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=35407
just removing some exe's from starting up, doesn't remove them completely

 

So things have started again...

I followed the Basic Computer Maintenance That Everyone Should Do and the Read & Run Me First Malware Removal Guide again on Friday and the issues continue to persist.

I have all the logs etc, whats the next step do I start a new thread?

Thanks

Chris

 

make a post and attach your logs in the malware forum. http://forums.majorgeeks.com/forumdisplay.php?f=35