Computer Issues: Please Help

I realize there is a group I could post in for Windows and PC Users, however, they are not always the most active groups around and I'm kind of hoping for an answer today.

When I start up my computer, everything seems to be working fine....it comes to where the background wallpaper image comes up and then...that's it. The wallpaper comes up but nothing loads, no programs, no windows that I can tell..

When I C-A-D, it shows that only three programs are running:

Addpl32
Appyt32
Appzb32

And when I end each of these programs, I am told they are not responding. After I close each program, nothing happens.

I have put my nortons disk in and ran the emergency virus protection, but it shows that there are no infected files on my computer (Granted it IS 2002). I don't have anything higher.

I have tried to start in safe mode but it will not load and only brings me back to a A:/ prompt. I'm not sure if there is anything I can do while in A:/ prompt or C:/ prompt.

Please help!

My opinion:
Your Norton is lying to you. Your computer has been effictivley wiped by a virus of some sort. Unfortunatley, there's practically nothing you can do to save what was on your hard drive. Before I can point you in the right direction, which version of Windows are you running?

BTW, Norton sucks. Bad. McAfee isn't much better. And both are expensive as hell (one of the biggest scams going in the computer business, IMO). If you want good virus protection that's absolutely free, you need you some AVG love. Go here and download it for free once you're up and running.

And if you need a good, free firewall, go here and download Zone Alarm for free.

Windows ME.

do you have the system restore option??

You poor, poor soul.


On the upshot, it should be relatively easy to get you back up and running. You're going to need to reformat from the Fdisk up. Hope you still have your recovery/boot discs, because you're going to need them.

I could walk you through the process, but it would take a month of Sundays to type it all out.

This page is one of the best I've found for walking someone through an Fdisk reformat. Easy step by step instructions. Just follow along.

Downside to all of this is that you're going to lose everything that was on your hard drive. Whatever you had saved on disc can be re-installed, obviously, but everything else is lost. The perils of modern computing.

I appreciate your help.
Is there any way, if I go buy WINXP I could install that instead?

I mean I could just upgrade it?

Thing is, I got the computer from work and I have no idea where all the disks are. I'll definately do a search...
And if I can't find them, if I buy WINXP I'll still need all the drivers, right? Can you buy those?

I'm probably not making much sense.
lol

I would put the original Windows install disk in (hopefully you have one) and boot up the computer using that. Don't reinstall yet, just boot. It should give you a choice. You will probably get to a c: prompt. If you do, check your directory structure to make sure your data is there.

If everything seems to be there, your choice is to (a) try to repair or reinstall windows without reformatting your hard drive, which may wipe out all your settings and require you to reinstall most or all of your programs, but should preserve all your personal files, pictures, etc, or (b) buy a new hard drive, pull the old one, reinstall everything on the new HD, make the old HD a slave, and rescue your data from the old HD. Since it's been a while since I upgraded a computer from ME to XP, I don't remember if the ME cd's have a "recovery" or "repair" option, so you may be stuck reinstalling.

You may have a (c) option, which would be to upgrade to XP and hope that the upgrade preserves your data, but you need to buy an XP upgrade disk. However, this didn't work on one of my machines and I ended up installing from scratch anyway.

Actually, what I types here earlier is not true, because you can get to your wallpaper. So, oops.

If that doesn't work, then the drive itself may be bad. Or not. There are many things that could be wrong, and I am not expert enough to know all of them. If you don't trust yourself to do this, there's no shame in bringing it in to a repair shop, because I have lost data in these situations and I know it is easy to do. Hope some of this helps.

[Edited on Apr 09, 2005 by commonman]