Two Technical Problems

[cundor]

1) I downloaded some bootscreens/themes from themeXP.org and installed them succesfully and all that, but every time my computer starts I have to make a choice between the different boot screens. So, I was like: "this sucks i dont want to press enter every time i start my pc" so i removed all the other bootscreens. Now I only have one bootscreen left and it when i start my computer it still asks which bootscreen to pick. What do I have to do?

2) A friend of my has this really shitty problem. Every time he wants to download something from a site by clicking a link, there's this new IE window popping up and opening a search page. The download won't start, but it works fine when he clicks right mousebutton and then "save as..."
But still...pretty stupid links don't work for him. What to do?

Thx a lot!

[wadi]

2. Use Mozilla Firefox. It's way better. If you insist on running IE, run your spyware/anti-virus stuff, and then see if that doesn't fix the problem.

[Stabwound]

I have the same problem with the bootup screens.

[Mr. Peanuts]

I have that problem but with 2 installs of Windows XP registering.

It asks me which one to select at startup, probably because I fucked things up when I reinstalled XP.

I just hit enter, I'm not fussed.

Cundor, does it say "Downloading from site" at the bottom of the new page open?

[DarkBlaze]

I think its spyware I recommend spybot and ad-aware for that just did that on my aunts pc and everything worked fine again (before that only whit pages ect)

[Mr. Peanuts]

Ahhh, It could be spyware. It occasionally does that to me on broken download links, If it is doing it all the time, it might just be the remains of old spyware,

use adaware from Lavasoft

www.lavasoftusa.com

[Fallen Angel]

The installation of the bootscreen made changes in the boot.ini file located in your system root.

The contents of this file should look something like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

Under the "operating systems" heading in your boot.ini file there should be two or more listings. Simply remove the invalid listings, save the file and you should be good to go.

Note: you should always make a backup of this file before you make any changes to its content!

[Fallen Angel]

As for the second problem, this searchpage would happen to be called CoolWebSearch would it? If it is, here's a program that will remove it permanently: http://www.computercops.biz/downloads-file-349.html

Otherwise, download and run Ad-Aware to seek out any other spyware that might be installed, and remove it. If that doesn't do the trick, download and run HijackThis and post the log here.

[WiseCherub]

Earlier today, I had a very unpleasant experience and believe its because of Adware or PopUp crap.

I was in elim, and suddenly.. my HD was going wild.. major Hard drive accessing.. Game graphics going all jerky.. ugh, It scared the hell out of me. I alt+tab onto desktop and what do I see..hmm.. EULA Installation.. I immediately thought someone was hacking into my system, killed the process and shutdown.

Yes, get Adaware 6 from lavasoft, its quite good. Another one I tried was StopZILLA (but not sure about this one, anyone know anything about it?).

Anyhow I let Adaware do its job, it took like 20mins to go thru my system and it came up with 284 suspicious objects.

I saw all this spyware crap, I felt like an idiot for letting it go on like this.

Typically, there is Spyware (Dataminers, web monitoring, popup spammers, etc) and then there is some Spyware which is MalWare (Malicious Ware) which allows programs to run on your system and monitor it.

I believe my problem before.. sometimes when I play Continuum, my screen freezes for 1-2 secs... was attributed to Spyware crap. I hope this is the case.

Another thing I did to get a look at my system is to use this software.

RUN> msconfig

msconfig is great cause I can goto STARTUP TAB and see what programs are trying to run on boot up. It looks like some LYCOS POPUP program placed itself in my startup registry.. how sad.

Also use CCTASK or any task monitor software, this will let you see what processes/tasks are running on your system. Look for anything out of the ordinary.. like LYCOS program didn't look cool too me, die scumbag task!!!

I will never underestimate Spyware again after this experience, omg I feel so dumb to let this problem grow. Oh well one good learning experience I must say.

[cundor]

or i could just grab my boot.ini.backup and put it in c:\
Thank you Roger_Rabbit!
closed

[Mr. Peanuts]

Opened