Window titles and words vanish?

[faeldray]

I think this is one of the strangest computer errors I've ever seen. And of course it happens to appear on my own computer. It's the little imps that live inside it, I tell ya.

It only happens if my computer isn't restarted or shut down after about a day of being on. Things just start to disappear and errors began to show up. The first sign is usually when words will evaporate for the web page I'm viewing or at least change to some strange and new font. The next step is for the title bars of windows to disappear as well. Then comes the weird errors, most of which I can't read because all the words has disappeared (how ironic). From the ones that I have seen, they vary from time to time. For example, I'll get phrases like "Out of system resources", "Not enough memory to process command", "Windows was unable to save such and such a file...", etc. Winpatrol will pop up with a notification that new startup programs have been found, despite the fact that the programs in question have been on the startup list for months and have already been confirmed.

It seems to have nothing to do with CPU usage as I can play for hours of WoW or NWN and not run into a single problem. It always seems to occur after the computer's been on for a straight day. Restarting solves the problem until the next 24 hours have passed.

I'm at my wit's end with it. It's incredibly annoying and doing God-knows-what to the system. I have anti-virus and a good firewall running all the time. I scan regularly (at least every week) with multiple anti-spyware programs. CCleaner has been run, as well as a defragmenter and CHKDSK. What in bloody hell am I doing wrong?

OS: Windows XP Home SP2
CPU: 2 GHz
RAM: 756 MB
Security/maintenance programs: AOL Active Virus Shield, Comodo Firewall, Spybot, Ad-Aware, CCleaner, Winpatrol, SpywareBlaster, TweakNow Reg Cleaner, AusLogic Disk Defrag

 

[russ]

try testing your memory. If you don't have software to do it try taking out a memory module (756 probably a 512 + 256= 768mb). Take out the 256 and see if it does it on the 512 alone

 

[Po`Girl]

Causes of no resources error include -

1.Too many programs running,(including spyware) for the amount of memory

2.A badly written program that has a memory leak.

As russ nearly said,make sure Windows recognizes all 756 MB.

Go into msconfig and uncheck EVERYTHING except Comodo,then restart computer.

 

[faeldray]

As for testing the memory, I ran memtest a couple times with no errors found. I have a feeling that it's not the memory that's the problem, but more likely a program with a memory leak, like Po'Girl said. I'll try disabling all the startup programs expect for Comodo and my anti-virus and then slowly re-implement the other programs. It'll be one long test *sigh*

 

[gavinseabrook]

Could be a backdoor virus. Or some form of timed one. Check your event viewer (Start>Control Panel>Administrative tools>event viewer) for any errors that seem out of place under the System Area. Also, try running a few virus scans. I prefer yahoo toolbar w/ antispy, followed by Windows defender.

 

[faeldray]

I finally solved the problem. Through the process of elimination, I discovered that AOL Active Virus Shield had been causing the problem. Removing it fixed everything. And not a moment too soon either. I had installed the same program on my parents' computer a couple months ago. Lately they had been having problems with it and turned to me to help. Going by the symptoms as they described to me, I manage to temporarily fix it when I was home one weekend. When the problem came back one week later, I made some calls to HP and they told me that the hard drive had failed and needed to be replaced. While we were waiting to send it in, I used the temp fix on the computer again and realized that this computer had been having the same problem as mine. My parents' description of the symptoms had been strange so I hadn't made the connection at first. So I remove Active Virus Shield....and "miraculously", the hard drive is fine and doesn't need to be replaced.

Morale of the story: No more AOL anti-virus programs on my machines

 

[gavinseabrook]

AOL sucks in general. Once installed, there are so many programs that start upon boot, it just slows your comp like nothing else.