I seem to have developed a problem with my PC, it is possible it is a virus one, so I thought I would ask......anyone heard of this one.

A couple of weeks ago my daughter apparetly got the Snow White E Mail that Rik refered to, in her hotmail account, she didn't know about the virus and opened the mail itself. Thankfully, because of the way Hotmail screens everything, when she tried to open the attachment it wouldn't allow it, told her she had a virus and she deleted the whole thing.

Now I've only just been told about this today, but for the last couple of weeks I've been having a hardware problem.

After I have been on the PC for about an hour and a half, the area around the CD drive/3.5 Floppy drive starts making a nasty mechanical tapping noise.

The only way I can describe it is as if a small metal gate is being opened and let loose to close. This gets worse and then the PC shuts itself off and trys to start itself up again. I then have to hot-turn off the PC to stop it.

When the PC is swicthed on again, it goes slowly through the usual 'you didn't close windows properly' blue scandisc screen once that has gone to 100% it allows the system to open although it then gets into a sequence of error messages, one of them said Explorer caused an exception C0000006h in module SHELL 32.dll AT 017F:7FD00448 and another was a disc write error which said Unable to write to disc in Drive C: data of files may be lost accompanied by the usual press any key to continue.

I then seem to toggle between these two each time I press a key. At one stage last night I got a black screen message that stated I would need to re-install windows.

If I turn off the machine (by hot turn off) and then leave it for a couple of hours, I can come back to it, go through the blue screen scandisk routine and it loads up OK and I can use the PC for a couple of hours until it goes into that routine again.

ANYONE got any idea's.....its got me ripping out what grey locks I've got left.

-- Anonymous, February 25, 2001

Answers

ITK, it doesn`t sound quite the same as the one we had, though there seems to be several versions of this virus. Have you got something like Mcafee Virus Scan (with the latest updates)? If you have, have you run an online scan with them?(:o)

-- Anonymous, February 25, 2001

BTW. that`s as techie as I get ITK - when it gets even slightly more complicated I usually mail Gav for advice! (;o)

-- Anonymous, February 25, 2001

ITK - doesn't sound like a virus to me, but then these things can manifest themselves in many ways, so I guess it could be. But it actually sounds more like hardware (disk??) to me. Do you have a warranty with your PC? Or perhaps call the Microsoft hotline with the error message you're getting.

Good luck.

-- Anonymous, February 25, 2001

I'd had the Snow White thing and tried to opne and failed but suffered afterwards much the same as you have described although not the writing to the disk problem. Explorer kept crashing and I just lived with it as one of those things. When I saw the chat last week I went to the McAfee web site and downloaded their software, took a while and cost 30 dollars. It then scans your whole hard drive and comes up and tells you the 8 or so files with a problem. You then have to delete/clean various things. It took me over an hour but the problem has gone completely.

If I was guessing I'd guess the write thing is a sympton. There is a big long description of variants of the thing.

One thing I did need was my original Windows 98 CD to get a fresh version of a WSOCK32.DLL file if you don't have such a thing anymore I can e-mail you (will do anyway) a clean copy. I'm away from my PC from now till tomorrow evening, good luck !!

-- Anonymous, February 25, 2001

It might be worth taking the case off the pc and checking that the processor fan is still working. What you describe can be the sort of thing that comes from something overheating.

-- Anonymous, February 26, 2001