Possesed Computer (Random Fatalities)

[glowingnissan07]

Basic Specs

AMD Duron 1.35 GHz
256 MB RAM
15 GB Maxtor Hard Disk
JMLX DVD-Rom
PCchips K3 Motherboard

For a long while, my PC has been working perfectly. THe only purposes I use it for is playing like CD-Rom games and recording audio files with my GNX3000 guitar sound system. At times I'd download games from the net from a seperate PC and transfer them to mine, so i installed some Panda Titanium AntiVirus software, just in case a virus transfered. I had no problems really, except occasional software problems, such as Errors with ProTracks Plus 2.2 recording software and some other errors with SH4 and Halo, but nothing real big. The biggest problems i had was in random incidents, with random applications or folders, my PC would automatically restart. It was annoying, but i delt with it because it was my fault i bought a crappy PC anyway.

About 3 or 4 months ago, about 15 seconds after being on the desktop, a Error popped up from the INS application. (I have no idea what that is) It said "Run time Error '53' File Not Found". It never affected any of my application or PC performance, so i ignored it. Today I located briefly on the Task Manager, although no window was shown or application shown on the taskbar. I clicked Goto Process, which led me to windupdates.exe. Yea, confusing.

Recently, about a week ago, my PC grew a mind of its own. On bootup, it would say

Novell Network Ready Firmware v1.00 (940809)

Copyright 1991-1994 Novell, Inc. All rights reserved.
SiS 900/7016 PCI Adapters DOS ODI Driver v1.14 (020416)
Copyright 1998 SiS Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

RPL-ROM-ADR: 0011 5BC6 6274
RPL-ROM-IRQ:5

RPL-ROM-FFC:[1-5] (Would go from 1 to 5 before proceeding to the following line)

Reboot and select Proper Boot Device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot Device and press a key.

Just found today that it was trying to boot off my Network Card. Yet I have no network hooked up to my PC. It was wierd. It would skip over my first boot device (hard disk) and my DVD-ROM to the Network Card. At times, when i disabled the network card, i got this on bootup:

Reboot and select Proper Boot Device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot Device and press a key.

Yet, at other times, it would recognize it correctly and would work. During this dilemna, or when i could actually get to Windows, my PC, whenever it wanted to, completely crashed. instant fatal error, for no apparant reason at all. Whether either in the middle of a game, or even before i logged on, 1 of 6 things happened:

-FROZEN, loss of control of mouse and keyboard, image on screen frozen, Hard Disk Light remians on at full strength. (Most frequent)

-FROZEN, loss of control of mouse and keyboard, image on screen froze, Hard Disk Light completely turns off, no function causing any HD activity.

-FROZEN, HDD light either on or off completely, and monitor turns off. Power still going to it, but it turned off none the less. Turning it on only gives you the SELFTEST, ensuring that the computer is the cause of the problem. No image signal at all.

-FROZEN, HDD light either on or off completey, and monitor turns off, totally.
Pushing the the power button on the monitor doesnt turn it on at all. The PC is like not permitting power to it. I have to physically unplug and replug the monitor to get it to turn on, and once i do, i get the SELFTEST. No image signal at all.

-Cursor turns to loading symbol and remains that way indefinately. PC Activity halts. HDD Light completely off. Yet, at least i can move the mouse. :giddy:

-During the times Windows is working (before these crashes) sometimes the image to the monitor is jumping with inconsistancy. Ie. image movement for 2 seconds, then 2 seconds of frozen screen, etc. etc.)But Ive had this problem before at certain times, before my PC became possessed. :evil:

These dilemnas greatly disturbed me. But I have unmasked a lot but have found no solution.

Here are my processes, excluding winupdate.exe after the Ins error and when no apps are running (other than those on taskbar) *all CPU and Mem Usage values are at their peak values for that process. Blank spaces for CPU represent 00*

[CENTER]Process /User / CPU / Memory Usage (K)
taskmgr.exe / ME /02 / 5420
wvavclt.exe / System/ / 6380
WEBPROXY / ME/ / 1812
alg.exe / Local Service/ / 6148
AVENGINE.EXE / System / / 23956
PAVSRV51.EXE / System / / 7980
PavPrSrv.exe / System / / 844
msmgs.exe / ME / / 3024
APVXDWIN.EXE / ME / / 4272
qttask.exe / ME / / 7724
p2pnetworking.nexe / ME / / 5764
rundll32.exe / ME/ / 5808
SOUNDMAN.EXE / ME / 06 / 4140
explorer.exe / ME / / 13796
Pavkre.exe / System / / 2596
PavFnSvr.exe / System / / 4352
Pavfires.exe / System / 04 / 6128
spoolsv.exe / System / / 6168
svchost.exe / Local Service / / 5088
svchost.exe / Network Service / 04 / 2612
svchost.exe / System / / 18336
svchost.exe / Network Service / / 4704
PAVPROT.EXE / System / / 5084
svchost.exe / System / / 4368
lsass.exe / System / / 6348
services.exe / System / / 5088
winlogon.exe / System / / 1660
csrss.exe / System / / 4496
smss.exe / System / / 400
PSIMSVC.EXE / System / / 2244
Presvsrv.exe / System / / 2788
System / System / / 220
System Idle Process / System / 98 / 16[/CENTER]
*Italized Processes are ones I have no idea what they are. any process with PAV i found out was for Panda Anti Virus, b/c after I uninstalled it all those processes disappeared. The bold ones are ones that caused a System Shutdown grom the NT Authority/SYSTEM when I ended the process.. The Upper one on the list gave me this

"Windows must not restart because the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) terminated unexpectedly." And thus gave me 60 seconds to save what i was doing before it logged off and restarted.

THe second one gave me the same thing except ..."the DCOM Server Process Launcher service terminated unexpectedly." Anyone know what this means? And what is svchost.exe? How can I stop my PC from running 5 of them at the same time?

Being rather flustered, I ultimately decided I probably had to reinstall Windows. So I went to XP Setup from the Bootup, and got this:

NTLSDR is compressed
press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to restart

I didn't know what that meant until today. I had compressed my entire drive to make room for my increasing amount of audio data. (which presently takes up about 40% of my disk space) Yet I had also compressed the Windows files. After feeling like an ***** during that aha moment, i tried logging onto windows to uncompress those files. I tried many times, but it would crash before it could finish. I don't know how to uncompress it from DOS. Also learning that uncompressing it all would undoubtedly take up the 2.5 GB i have left. And Theres no way i can clear unwanted audio data is 30 seconds or less.

I tried Safemode and all other options from the F8 menu, with no luck. Crashing on all of them. Some laster longer than others. In fact, Directory Services mode, after telling me my hard disk was clean, lasted a whole 3 and a half minutes before crashing. As you can see, this is driving me insane.

I shut off my Ethernet card from the BIOS, which got rid of my Novell problem on the bootup, but i still dont know why everything seems to be trying to start a Network service on its own. I decided to shut off my DVD-ROM drive, to no avail, Windows still froze. I tried bootup from the Windows XP CD that i bought, and either 1 of 2 things happened.

CDBOOTERROR: Memory overflow

or it would run setup, and it would crash before i could barely start installing/repairing windows. thinking that Windows was still interfering, i set my hard disk to uninstalled from the BIOS and ran the XP CD again, and it still froze! I've decided its either my CPU, Motherboard, or RAM. or perhaps its the demon living in my harddrive that laughs at me when im about to smash my monitor with an axe. :knock: Everything acts 100% normal before each crash. Ive had task manager show my CPU and Mem Usage behavior, and the graphs look fine, and in the midst of that its a crash.

Options

New Hardrive: But if its not a harddrive ill be wasting a lot of money...sort of. I do need more space though.

Extra RAM: Need it, but I have no idea what type I have. one time i put some RAM into a PC and it fried the slot it went into b/c it was the wrong type.

New motherboard: My mom wont be happy knowing this is the 3rd K3 motherboard ive went through on this PC. Im glad they're only $30 on Newegg.

New PC: Last Resort if you guys cant help me fix it.

Post anything you can. Thanks!

 

[glowingnissan07]

whoops

yea, my b. It's a K7 motherboard, not K3.

I know my PSU is fine, because the power light and fan remaind on after the crash. Yet my i felt near my CPU after i shut it off and it was hot. I know the temp rose on that from like 104 deg F to 115 deg F. Is that too high?

Checked other posts, none have problems im having.

Video card = Radeon 9200

i keep hearing about this minidump. What exactly is that, what do i use it for, and how exactly do i make one?

 

[howard_hopkinso]

windupdates.exe is a virus/worm.

So, before we go trying to fix any other problems your may have. Lets see if we can get your system cleaned up.

Go HERE and follow the instructions exactly.

Post a fresh HJT log into a new thread, in our security and the web forum, only after doing the above.

Regards Howard

 

[N3051M]

New Hardrive: But if its not a harddrive ill be wasting a lot of money...sort of. I do need more space though.

You should know as an audio dude that space is never enough . Its a good practice to record onto a seperate hdd to the system hdd (not partitions, physical hdds). Couple of reasons being space and memory, also to decrease latency and intense fragmentation...

minidumps are found in %systemroot%/minidumps where systemroot is your local windows folder. its a little file that stores kind of what state the machine was in at that time and help find the problem. To turn that function on, you just have to go to [Control Panel>System>Advanced Tab>Startup and Recovery Settings] and under "Write debugging...." set to "Complete memory dump" in the drop down box. You may as an option turn off automatic restarting to see the "Blue Screen Of Death" instead of the restart.

 

[glowingnissan07]

no web on my PC

Howard,

#1: MY PC is NOT hooked up to the web. The free antivirus stuff in the instructions you gave is not downloadable. Know any antivirus software I can download off the web HERE and then transfer it to my PC?

#2: If you could be so kind as to give me the link that walks me to creating a HJT file step by step.

Thanks

 

[howard_hopkinso]

Obviously you won`t be able to run the online scanners, so just skip that step and go on to the rest of the instructions.

Just download all the stuff in the instructions, on the computer you`re using now and burn it to a cd. Then, put the cd in your sick computer and install the programmes.

The instructions on where to get and how to post a HJT log are also in the instructions I gave you.

Regards Howard

 

[glowingnissan07]

N3051M

Turned on complete Memory Dump in Recovery Settings like you said. Correct me if I'm wrong, minidump files record data from the RAM right? Is there a way to post the data from a minidump and isolate the problem? I mean I could just post the file i guess, and leave all the .dmp decoding for you guys. heh i bet thats fun.

oh, and by the way. I can pretty much keep a stable PC when using Directory Service (Windows Domain Controllers only) when i booted up. I was sucessfull able to uncompress the Windows Folder and its contents --at least most of them. There was a bunch of them that couldnt uncompress because they were in use by other processes.

The last time it froze I was trying to defrag. It seems to crash at around 10-20% into it. I never got a "Blue Screen of Death", even though i disabled the automatic restart. Hopefully all this may give a clue to the source of this problems.

Oh yeah ill make sure i bring that HJT log on my next post. Thanks howard

 

[glowingnissan07]

ok Howard. I got the stuff. Couple of things you should know...

For one thing, ive noticed I don't have to physically shut my PC off and then turn it back on again after a crash. It returns to its normal state on a restart.

I had two crashes in Safe Mode (actually i was only using Windows Domain Controllers, which is also includes Safe Mode), one while Deep Scanning the Registry with Adaware SE and one at the moment of click "OK" of showing me the extracted files of Hijack this. On my second time aroundt though, i was able to finish the task of scanning and also of extracing the files from Hijack this, so i guess there's reason to conclude that the problem precedes the apps/processes i run.

oh, i also got this after finishing AboutBuster, which was similar to my RuntimeError '53' (see my first post)

Run-time Error '339':

Component 'comctl32.ocx' or one of its dependencies not correctly registered: a file missing or invalid

what the heck are runtime errors?



Heres my hijackthis logfile, which ill be posting here as well as where you told me to.


thats all it gave me, so whatever. Tell me what to do.

I'm not sure its worth mentioning, but Adaware gave me 33 Negligible Objects. Of course, they're negligible, so i wont post them unless you want to see them.

thanks howard

 

[howard_hopkinso]

Unfortunately you are using an outdated version of HJT.

The latest version is 1.99.1

Please obtain the latest version and post a fresh HJT log as an attachment.

I also asked you to start a new thread in our security and the web forum. Please don`t post any more HJT logs into this thread. Thanks.


Regards Howard

 

[N3051M]

you can decode the minidumps yourself, just download the debugger tool from microsoft's website, and the symbol pack for your version of windows. I myself kinda figured out how it roughly works, but i havent been able to download the symbols pack yet..

unfortunatly i'm going to be running late for work, so all i can tell you is to search the forum on how to read minidumps. theres some step by step instructions..

 

[glowingnissan07]

New Freeze, no malware

ok good news and bad.

the good news is, my pc is clean from malware for now. That means no more Runtime Errors. :giddy: Last night was the first night it ran stable for a full 3 hours, and it was I who shut it off---not itself!

But just a few minutes ago, i was on for maybe 15 minutes, it froze up again. :unch: Monitor goes black, no hdd activity. At least I know its not malware...but im gonna run HJT again just to make sure the programs aren't spontaenous being resurrected.

In the mean time, someone give me some place to look for the problem, and how to look for it. thanks

 

[glowingnissan07]

GREAT NEWS!!! ...I think...

Is there the slightest chance that my rooms A/C could be the source of my crashes?

ok, it started crashing when i first hooked up my AC like a week ago. ive noticed it crashed everytime the compressor inside the AC clicked on, but i ignored it. Until now. Last night and today it was perfect when the AC was off. To test this theory, and i turned it on. And immediately, BAM!

CRashed


coicidences? you tell me.

 

[N3051M]

lol.. yes that air con can seriously suck up power.. is it on the same power strip as the pc? maybe split it off directly at the wall, then put the pc on the surge protector..

 

[glowingnissan07]

power issues

ok ok im getting really annoyed. I know i have all this heavy duty equipment in my room

Computer
360w Guitar Amp
600w Air Conditioner

but i live in an attic. Its hot up there. I want to be able to use my PC while running the AC and my amp. But everytime i do the power from the PC is drained. Is there anyway to fix that?

 

[SIRwILLETT]

i have a solution

run an extension cord from another plug,its not rocket science but it will work . lol

 

[N3051M]

run an extension cord from another plug,its not rocket science but it will work . lol

Definatly..

Otherwise call an electrician to put in another socket for you..

 

[glowingnissan07]

lol, i already tried that.

my whole room is like on one circuit or something. No matter what socket the AC is hooked up to, the computer crashes when the AC is on. Or it could be the combination of its fan + my 360 watt guitar amp. In any case, apparently when the wattage of appliances of my room exceeds 600 watts when my PC is on, the computer crashes. I still dont know why my PC crashes and not my AC or amp.

 

[N3051M]

well if you take it to a mate's place and run it there for a solid hour or whatever time it takes..

if it crashes then its the pc.. if it doesn't then you've got a power problem at your house..

you may be able to get your electrician to install another circuit is what i mean.. i'm pretty sure there's a max safe power output from each power point or circuit.. and if you exeed that then.. you've exceeded it..

any new minidumps?

btw.. physics 101: Power (watts) = Current (amps) x voltage..

 

[SIRwILLETT]

what i meant was

run an extension cord from the first or second floor depnding how many stories ur house is, the floor below ur room. then it want matter how much power ur PC uses. it would look ridiculous unless of course u have a formal stair case to ur room in the attic, but it beats no AC in the summer time!