Ok, I have a bad one.
Recently, my elderly mom got the XP Antivirus 2011 malware. I got that solved via the web, and found she had no working anti-virus, so I got here going with Avast and cleaned up a lot of stuff.
She is running XP Home Edition - and she lives clear across the country, no one to help.
So - at startup, she is being faced with an IE page saying the suggested web page can't be found and maybe it's a network problem (that she insists on believing and wanting to read me 6 year old HP user guides on networking - bless her, in her 80s she is).
She was also getting failure to launch a corrupted Yahoo messenger.
Neither show up in any of the account startup folders - I had here clear those out and she still got those two.
I then had her install Windows Defender and disable Yahoo Messenger on startup - that worked.
But the mysterious IE window remains - no address bar of course - and no way to get her to read off the list of processes in a way that makes sense from Task Manager when it's up (TM just shows the error window in the apps tab).
I wanted to try Remote Desktop - except - XP Home Edition doesn't support RD thru DSL.
I've tried going thru the entries in msconfig files - nothing bad there.
I've tried System Configuration Info but ultimately, every process listed for startup is a known process name, checked against blacklists by me, located in the correct places, and already virus scanned. If I have her uncheck everything in System Config Info and restart in diagnostic mode, the problem disappears.
So - I'm guessing that leaves the registry?
Any good, totally free registry cleaners out there I can trust?
Any suggestions where else to try to look for startup stuff under the circumstances?
Any chance of getting Remote Desktop working on XP HE thru DSL (the rest of the web says no, but I'm asking)?
Anyway - thanks and HELP!
Recently, my elderly mom got the XP Antivirus 2011 malware. I got that solved via the web, and found she had no working anti-virus, so I got here going with Avast and cleaned up a lot of stuff.
She is running XP Home Edition - and she lives clear across the country, no one to help.
So - at startup, she is being faced with an IE page saying the suggested web page can't be found and maybe it's a network problem (that she insists on believing and wanting to read me 6 year old HP user guides on networking - bless her, in her 80s she is).
She was also getting failure to launch a corrupted Yahoo messenger.
Neither show up in any of the account startup folders - I had here clear those out and she still got those two.
I then had her install Windows Defender and disable Yahoo Messenger on startup - that worked.
But the mysterious IE window remains - no address bar of course - and no way to get her to read off the list of processes in a way that makes sense from Task Manager when it's up (TM just shows the error window in the apps tab).
I wanted to try Remote Desktop - except - XP Home Edition doesn't support RD thru DSL.
I've tried going thru the entries in msconfig files - nothing bad there.
I've tried System Configuration Info but ultimately, every process listed for startup is a known process name, checked against blacklists by me, located in the correct places, and already virus scanned. If I have her uncheck everything in System Config Info and restart in diagnostic mode, the problem disappears.
So - I'm guessing that leaves the registry?
Any good, totally free registry cleaners out there I can trust?
Any suggestions where else to try to look for startup stuff under the circumstances?
Any chance of getting Remote Desktop working on XP HE thru DSL (the rest of the web says no, but I'm asking)?
Anyway - thanks and HELP!