DescentBB

When I booted my WinXP machine a few days ago, I found the desktop completely rearranged and apparently reverted to some pretty old state, with icons on it I had long removed.

Since then, whenever I open an application window or switch to one and start working in it and moving the mouse around in it, the mouse cursor freezes briefly (maybe a second or so), and then can be moved again.

This is very weird.

Any idea what this is and how to fix it?

Hm, could be anything. I would first check for HDD problems.

Could it be this SecuROM copy protection? I installed Supreme Commander a few days ago, and it came with that crap.

Could have been a registry crash too, try using system restore to turn everything back to before it messed up.

Maybe both ... may HD got very hot recently, although it is watercooled (55 deg centigrade at the outside).

o_O 55 outside? Yikes, my CPU never gets over 35 and I think that is hot!

/me sitting in comfortable air conditioned room. :-3

Almost sounds like an older restore point was activated, or maybe even Windows Update that runs every second Tuesday of every month. Or worse, a virus.

What's the problem with SecuROM? The only copy protection scheme I've had any problems with is Starforce.

Actually I am wondering whether some trojan is doing screen copies whenever I change a window.

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/houseca ... t_corp.asp

Worth a try anyway. :-/

Spybot S&D
AdAware
Windows Defender

Run the 1st 2 in safe mode. Windows Defender is more of a preventative program; it runs as a process and watches for malware.

Windows Defender is a great little tool, but I had to uninstall it because it caused several install failures when I tried to put a couple of new games on my other system.

However, I would recommend you try it out on your system to look for any malware and as a bonus you can check out every running task on your system. It's great for that.

I have the first two.

I have run two different malware checkers (sophos and RootkitRevealer) and run a virus check (NAV) plus installed WinPatrol, but none of these have found a trojan or backdoor. :-/

I will definitely try Windows Defender and the Trend Micro HouseCall (the latter takes a real long time to scan the system so I haven't used it yet).

Krom, my CPU was much cooler. I had been running two extremely computing intensive tasks on my system for many hours, and a dual core CPU gets hotter than single core (don't know what kind of CPU you have), so it may get hot, particularly if the room is very warm.

I wish you luck. Windows Defender will be fun to play with.

Diedel wrote:Krom, my CPU was much cooler. I had been running two extremely computing intensive tasks on my system for many hours, and a dual core CPU gets hotter than single core (don't know what kind of CPU you have), so it may get hot, particularly if the room is very warm.

I have a C2D E6600, in winter I have seen idle temps as low as 20C. Lately since it has been a lot warmer out, it runs closer to 35C idle, I probably also need to flush out the coolant...

Measured via CoreTemp or Asus tool ? Latter gives too low temps (using an external sensor).

Measured using CoreTemp here.

My measurment are made using temperature probes attached to the coolers.

Ever figure out what the problem was Diedel?