Hi everybody,

I am currently experiencing problems with my win2k sp4 installation. Everytime I attempt to run cmd.exe or a system program (taskmanager and basically everything in the control panel) that program shuts down nearly immidiately after opening. That is e.g. cmd appears briefly and then instantaniously closes down. I realise this hardly constitutes a good bug report, but I cannot really think of what I might have done wrong.
I hope I am not looking at a loss here. I utterly despise reinstallations especially because you learn nothing from them. Any helpful advice will be highly appreciated even if it does not lead to a solution. I have run AdAware and Multi Virus Cleaner 2005. Apart from the ever present cookie trackers it produced nothing.

Yours,
mad=dog

PS: The real pain here is that it shuts down everything I usually use for diagnostics. Regedit and TaskManager. Hope there's a solution out there. Google wasn't really helpful.

Head to Trend Micro (www.trendmicro.com) and run their on-line house call. It will do a full scan for malware and viruses, and let you rule that out.

Have you tried it from a different ID?

Hi Bungleau.

Thanks for the tips.

TrendMicro Housecall fails to install (yes I did use IE). It runs the installer, but fails somehow.

I tried setting up a new user and logging in using that, but the problem persists.

Hmmmm.... how about getting a copy of HiJack This (www.merijn.org) and running it? It will identify suspicious things and let you decide what to do with them.

If you've got another machine available, you might network the two of them by sharing the drives on the bad machine, connecting to Trend Micro with that machine, and scanning those drives. It may be worth a shot.

Aside from that... perhaps TDC or Andrewas will have some more thoughts. I'm never averse to reinstalling the OS, and sometimes, that's what's needed.

Oh, there's one more thing you can do. Turn off the system restore (my computer, disk, properties, somewhere in there), reboot into safe mode, and run your scans again. There's a chance that Windows is being *helpful* and restoring the files you've just taken out. Just be sure to turn on the system restore stuff again afterwards...

Okay. I am blushing. I found out that I had not updated IE to v6 and that is why HouseCall failed. It found a bunch of vira alright and I cleaned them. Still the problem persists, but I seem to have regained at least minimal control over some things. CMD, regedit and taskmanager still shuts down, but Services does not.
I couldn't locate System Restore. Shamed to admit that I have never needed it. Is it located in Services under a different name perchance?

Control Panel. System. System Restore. Turn it off on all drives.

I don't see anything even resembling that. I have 5 fans in System. "General", "Network Identification", "Hardware", "User Profiles" and "Advanced". None seems to hold anything called System Restore. There is a manual restore and backup system for the drives.