hello, i new to this forum and i'm having more than a few problems with my laptop lol.

anyways, first i reinstalled windows mainly because the wireless card quit working. that was the first time i reinstalled it in my laptop and its about 3 years old. so everything seemed to run fine after i also installed all the drivers too.

the problem i am having is the computer won't turn off properly when i either press the power button or when i go to start and select turn off. it will go to the desktop background and thats it. so i have to use quick shutdown by just press and hold.

then the computer after a certain amount of time running, most of the programs will crash that are running and it won't let me run any new programs.

and the final problem is everytime i turn off and then start my laptop back up, all the setting reset to default. the most common one i can think of when i choose all the icon in the bottom right hand corner to hide, they reappear again after new start-up.

i also have the low virtual memory error that keeps popping up every so often.

btw its a dell inspiron 6400 with windows xp.

any help would be great, thank you.

Might be a rootkit or a virus.

Could be a virus in your machine, try downloading Norton 360 which should sort out any potential problems. Otherwise perhaps consider a mobile broadband connection to improve your running of the programme.

this did this soon as i reinstalled windows though. is it possible that the virus still could have stayed throughout the whole the disk format?

It could pay to see what the 8 step guide uncovers in the way of Malware.

Viruses can actually stay throughout a format, its not always 100% guaranteed that wiping your disk will get rid of them.

How much RAM are you running on the PC?

1) It's worth double checking for viruses (see the 8 step guide link provided in last post by snowchick7669

2) When you reformat your drive did you do a quick or normal disk reformat? Normal disk formats will reformat all the space on your disk (vs. quick reformats which essentially just reformats select areas on the disk, e.g. like your disk's "table of contents"

3) You should also check your Windows Event logs and look through this link You experience log off problems on a Windows XP-based, Windows Server 2003-based, Windows 2000-based, or Windows NT 4.0-based computer