Possible virus attack - help please

Can anyone help with this problem with my machine please - On switching on,
Windows 98 appears to start up correctly, but only gets as far as playing the
startup jingle and showing the desktop wallpaper. Then there is a very brief
flash of what appears to be the taskbar, and the mouse pointer is visible but
nothing else. No desktop icons, no taskbar, no shortcut bar. The mouse pointer
moves with the mouse, but mouse buttons do not do anything. Keyboard is
unresponsive apart from Ctl - Alt - Del. That shows nothing to be running and
all you can do is shutdown again. Data CDs will not autorun on insertion.
Booting in Safe mode has the same result. I can however boot to the command
prompt which seems to be working OK.

Based on what I had been doing there are 2 likely causes for the situation -

First and most likely, a virus type thing - while surfing to the BBC news
website earlier, the page was slower than usual to come up, then I got a popup
box telling me that something had been found (something like spyware.exe or
similar) and did I want to delete it. Assuming it was a message from an anti
virus program I {stupidly} clicked yes. Horrible feeling now, that that may
have allowed something nasty to install itself.

The other thing I was doing was installing Nero and PowerDVD 5 which had been
bundled with a new CDRW/DVD combi drive I had just put into the machine. The
machine was rebooting after I had clicked to turn on DMA access on the drive
during the PowerDVD setup routine, when the problem became apparent. I suppose
then there could be some sort of driver or other problem associated with this,
but it seems less likely than the virus explanation.

Any help appreciated.
Malcolm (Fantrace).

Be happy.

On that special day, Malcolm, (fantrace@aol.comantispam) said...

> The other thing I was doing was installing Nero and PowerDVD 5 which had been
> bundled with a new CDRW/DVD combi drive I had just put into the machine. The
> machine was rebooting after I had clicked to turn on DMA access on the drive
> during the PowerDVD setup routine, when the problem became apparent.

That might be due to a chipset problem. I experienced crashes with VIA
chipsets on older (Apollo3) VIA chipsets, if the DMA was activated
without prior installation of the mainboard busmaster drivers.

Maybe you can get it back running if you start the machine in command
line and type

scanreg /restore

followed by hitting the Enter key. Then you should be presented with a
menu of five stages of former Registry versions. Choose one that was
saved before you changed the DMA setting and try again. Maybe you have
to install the Nero software, too, because it hadn't been part of the
registry at the given date.

Reboot, check if it works.

But before you re-enableDMA, first get some recent mainboard drivers (I
bet your Nero version is way younger than your mainboard driver CD) from
the homepage of the chipset manufacturer. For VIA it is
www.viaarena.com, the intel, ALi and SiS chipsets will have respective
driver homepages, too.


Gabriele Neukam

Gabriele.Spamfighter.Neukam DeleteThis @t-online.de


--
Ah, Information. A good, too valuable theses days, to give it away, just
so, at no cost.