What is Wintapi.exe

[The Best Alias]

Another sick machine has made it to my doorstep. Task mgr reveals a process called wintapi.exe sitting railed at 99% CPU usage and about 70% memory usage, even in safe mode. I couldn't get the machine to do anything. I gave up after about an hour. It's a total data loss as I reformatted the HD.

Question 2, I did plug in an external drive, do you think this bug mighta copied itself over to the external drive? I ain't plugging it back into any of my machines until I format it as well.

 

[RealBlackStuff]

TAPI is the Telephony-Application-Programming-Interface and is the standard for telephone support under Windows.
This normally connects a phone and a PC, using the serial port (as in older, serial modems).
Newer versions support ISDN, and the latest version (probably the one that gave you grief), uses TCP/IP.
That "sick" PC probably only had a rogue dialler, which could have been found using various anti-spyware programs. Did you try killing it in Taskmanager?
Also see my thread How to remove Begin2Search / Coolwebsearch with lots of programs for that.

And your second external drive is OK, wintapi does not propagate itself.

 

[The Best Alias]

Yask manager was about the only thing I could get to come up. I'd kill the process and and it'd come right back. If I launched my computer, the machine would just flat out stop dead in it's tracks. I couldn't load a CD with any spyware utils on it, and I certainly know better than to plug a sick PC into my lan. I certain there was more wrong with it, that was the process I saw sitting raild out. Thanks, I knew I had heard of tapi before, I just couldn't place it.

-Richard