Problems leading to large instabilitys

[jwbowyer]

About a month to a month and a half ago, my laptop had started experiencing issues. It would involve my surfing the web and it then the browser all of sudden "hanging." When I say hanging, it didn't freeze nor crash. The internet would simply not load any webpage. The only way to fix this was to exit my browser. But I found that after exiting, the firefox.exe process would continue to run in the background. If I tried just opening firefox again it would usually not work. I'd have to go into the processes and delete it before continuing. This problem would happen randomly over a day, and I could find no pattern as to why it would occur. It happened across multiple browsers and was not confined to Firefox. My IM programs would sometimes freeze or have odd errors but would never hang when the browser did; however, download managers and bit torrents were affected whenever the browser froze. At times the browser would refuse to load, and I'd have to restart the computer. I also noticed that when shutting down I'd have problems with something called an xp com event reciever closing itself down. I'd have two or three of these.

About a week ago my laptop worsened to an unusable state. XP would take ages to load, and upon loading I'd get some odd message stating something like notification dll could not be loaded and that my wireless internet would not work. The windows toolbar would not come up no matter if I moved my mouse down towards it or hit the flag button my keyboard. I could not copy and paste, nor drag and drop files. And finally it would not shut down, it would get stuck somewhere along the shutting down process and stay there for however long I left it. Forcing me to forcibly turn it off. I gave up on the laptop and am now building a new PC.

I've started to use another pc in the house, and have found that slowly its been exhibiting problems similar to what was happenign on mine. Every now and then over the past week, I'd have problems with the internet browser not wanting to load. Thus forcing me to restart, today twice I've had the browser encounter a fatal error forcing me to close it, and then it would not load again. I've even had my IM freeze on me, and had the xpcom event receivers have issues upon restarting.

I've been told that some of these problems started around the same as mine did. That is when I upgraded a internet filter called ContentProtect to version 2. I wonder if this is related or consequence, but it seems to be a common connecting thread between the two computers. I

But if anyone has any idea upon the matter please post, perhaps if the problem has a solution then maybe my laptop can be saved. Thanks for reading.

[Fatality]

You probably have a virus (yeah, whats new ^_^). One question, do you take good care of your computer, seriously?

[jwbowyer]

I knew I forgot to mention something. I've done virus scans on both computers, using different scanners norton in one case, and then AVG in another and nothing was found. And yes I take good care of my computer....

[glc]

Well, if that filter seems to be a common thread, uninstall it.

[jwbowyer]

Originally Posted by glc Well, if that filter seems to be a common thread, uninstall it.

Well I was considering that as a last resort, just wondering if anyone has seen this issue and could connect it to any known problem. But if not I'll have to do that.

[Fatality]

I'd use HouseCall 6.5 for scanning. I never trusted Norton, AVG, or McAfee. In my opinion, I think they suck...it's up to you though.

It's free and you have to download like 4MB of stuff on your computer to run it. All you do is before you go to bed or whatever just let it run overnight because on average it takes longer than your average Virus Scanner. www.housecall65.trendmicro.com

[glc]

Fatality, why would BOTH computers be doing this - I really don't think it's a virus. You have made your point, but both computers have been scanned.

[Fatality]

I suggested, calm down...what if he downloaded/installed something on both computers that is causing the same problem for both? You never know...