Virus or coincidence?

[Cyphrr]

Ok, last Friday I had a machine come in with some booting problems. It is a win98FE box, and here are the symptoms. It boots, almost gets to the desktop, but never does. The only thing that happens is that the task bar appears for a split second, and then disappears. After this happens, the machine stops any hard drive activity. It is not locked up. I can still bring up the task manager, but nothing running that appears to be strange. I ran our Sophos antivirus dos level scanner on it, but came up clean. It was late in the day and I figured I would check it out on Monday (today) The kicker is, that I just got three more machines in today with the same exact problem and symptoms. All of them are either 98FE or SE. Anyone else run into this?

[Diver01]

I have not seen this lately. Does any of the systems boot into safe mode ok?

[Cyphrr]

I have not seen this lately. Does any of the systems boot into safe mode ok?

Safe mode does the same thing.

[Humilliation]

Have you run scandisk in real-dos mode?

[Cyphrr]

Scandisk from boot disk checked out ok. Got two more machines in today with the same problem and symptoms. Have not had much time today to check them out because I was busy with on sites. If I find anything out tomorrow, I will post back. In the meantime, this is going to drive me to…..

[TripleRLtd]

From the symptom's you describe: there is NOTHING we can help with until we get more info:
How about bootlog.txt?
Give us something to work with, alright? So, you have what, five or so machines in now with the same symtoms? First off, boot up with nothing but the video card in safe mode. Once up and running we could help most if you give us EVERYTHING that is running in the background. Download Hijack This and post the results. OK?

[kpataska]

Ok, last Friday I had a machine come in with some booting problems. It is a win98FE box, and here are the symptoms. It boots, almost gets to the desktop, but never does. The only thing that happens is that the task bar appears for a split second, and then disappears. After this happens, the machine stops any hard drive activity. It is not locked up. I can still bring up the task manager, but nothing running that appears to be strange. I ran our Sophos antivirus dos level scanner on it, but came up clean. It was late in the day and I figured I would check it out on Monday (today) The kicker is, that I just got three more machines in today with the same exact problem and symptoms. All of them are either 98FE or SE. Anyone else run into this?

Sounds like a bad device/driver if you ask me...

Remove ALL non-essential hardware (modem, NIC, etc.) and see if you can boot normally.

After that, I'd backup the registry and delete the ENUM key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and allow Windows to re-enumerate all hardware. Have your device drivers ready!

Might be a bad copy of explorer.exe - you could try expanding it from the cabs and replacing it.

Let us know how it goes!

Hope this helps!!!

Kenny P.
Visualize Whirled P.'s

[Cyphrr]

GOT IT! Changed shell=explorer in system.ini to shell=taskman.exe. Rebooted and from taskman ran the IE6 install from a floppy disk. Selected to reinstall all components. Reset shell back to explorer and now machine boots to windows fine. I have three up and running again and more to go. Thanx guys and gals. See if the rest work out.......