Date: 03/23/05 (Microsoft Windows)    Keywords: web, spyware

Recently I've been having some problems with my computer which is running Windows 2000 Pro and has a AMD Thoroughbred CPU. Some things I did before I started having problems: I recently took out the RAM and then put it back in (long story) but the computer seems to recognize that okay. I also recently tried to add to it a DVD burner, but for some reason I was having problems with the computer recognizing it. Power was going to it just fine but it wasn't being recognized by PnP. I haven't installed the drivers yet, but I'm not sure that's the problem. Regardless, that's something to tackle another day. I also got a "new" monitor which works just beautifully. Unfortunately, I'm not home right now so I can't give the specs on all of those.

Anyway, the problem is that the video card wasn't working at all although it had been working quite well in the past. It is Geforce 4 MX 440 I believe. If I recall, it stopped working before I tried it with the new monitor. Regardless, it doesn't work with either of them. So I uninstalled it and was going to try to reinstall the drivers to see if that would fix the problem. But InstallShield stopped working. I believe I got error -1607: Unable to Install InstallShield Scripting Run Time. So I went to their website and was going to install the updates and see if that worked. But the Windows Installer said that it didn't work (I'm sorry, I don't remember the exact error).

Also: some of the things in the Start Menu such as the Windows Updater and the search for files don't work (at least when selected from the Start Menu). I cannot click and drag things from the Desktop to the trash (or is it recycle bin in Windows? I'm primarily a Mac user). Whenever I click on the Programs Folder, the folder is completely empty although it shows there being x amount of files at the bottom of the window. When I try to search in that folder, then files will show up in the search and I have to access them that way or through the command prompt.

When I hadn't figured out that it was my video card that was the reason my computer wouldn't start up past a certain point, my boyfriend who is much more knowledgeable about Windows than I am, ran the computer in safe mode and went through my registry and program folder and deleted some programs that he thought might be suspicious (for the record, I think we were being overly cautious--they didn't look like spyware to me, but then, I must admit that I can't remember where they came from), and I ran PCillin and AdAware on the computer.

When I finally find the Windows 2000 disk that I have I was just going to reinstall Windows, because we're both stumped, but maybe someone can give me some insight on what I should do instead? I have a feeling there's something obvious that I'm missing. Thank you very much for your help!

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/ms_windows/25354.html