Had a lot of help from here before so I'm back with a fresh problem.

Built my dad a PC last year - it has just started to mis-behave. The spec is - MSI KM4M-L mobo, AMD Duron 1100, 512Mb generic PC2700, 80Gb HDD, 350W PSU, CDR/W, floppy, generic keyboard/mouse/speakers/monitor/printer. He mostly does excel/word and a bit of email/surfing so cutting edge isn't needed!

He rang me up this week (he's 170miles away) as he is finding it takes 25 minutes to boot into windows, once in there he has no start button, the windows key calls up the usual panel but a lot of the options are missing, Nero won't work so he is backing up to floppies in case. Takes a long time to open folders (up to a couple of minutes), can't drag and drop to the floppy, has to set up a folder first. He also can't connect to the web or email. He thinks it may be a trojan or similar but his AdAware and AVG are up to date to withing a week and haven't found anything.

From the way he has described it it sounds like a driver issue to me, but I don't know what one. Has anyone got any suggestions?

He has lost the install CD (so I may have to do a full reinstall for him when I visit in a few weeks time), but as he still has web access at work he might be able to download at work and copy in if there is something like a driver pack or some checking software he could run to locate the problem. Any recommendations please?

Thanks for any clues here - I'm not too hot on this remote IT lark!

If the virus and spyware scans have come out clean, maybe you could ask him to boot into safe mode, run CHKDSK and defrag the drive. Even if he has been only browsing/using Word etc coz temporary files are created in the background, which get fragmented and slow down the system. Has he deleted temp internet files n folders?

Here's a couple thoughts... Have him press <Windows key>+<R> to bring up the run dialog. enter "chkdsk c: /f " (without the quotes, of course). Answer yes to 'check disk on the next restart'. Reboot and let it do it's thing. Then reboot again into safe mode and do a system restore to a date to before the problem started.

It may help

Thanks, guys. Gives me some more pointers for him. I think I put window washer on the system, but he may have turned it off. That would help with the temp files and stuff too. I'll get back (again) if there are still problems!