I have had to reinstall Windows on my computer twice in the last 3 days. Something slimy must have infested it, because important system files kept disappearing.
Hopefully I have it cleaned out this time so it will stay up, but if I become unresponsive again, you’ll know why!
There must be nasty things out there that Zone Alarm isn’t catching, huh?
Comment by Donna — November 11, 2006 @ 11:04 pm
Were you able to just reinstall the OS or did you have to start from scratch? That can be really ugly.
Comment by Richard — November 13, 2006 @ 9:31 pm
The first two times it happened, I did a repair install. Took a couple of hours, but all my settings were preserved (mostly).
At this time, I realized that each time it crashed, there were several hundred files missing from the system32 folder. I backed up that folder so that the third time it crashed I just copied the files back and everything was fine. But I still had the mystery of why these files were getting deleted.
So after the third time, I set up a monitor on one of the files that kept disappearing so I could tell immediately if it was deleted. I also noticed that each incident happened during the night, so I started running the programs that ran in the night.
First, I ran AVG. Nothing happened. Then my Cobian Backup program. Bingo! I have three separate backup jobs. During the third job, suddenly notices started appearing that my target file was being affected. I immediately opened the system32 folder in explorer, and watched as all the files were deleted, and then most of them put back. In the end, again, there were a few hundred missing.
I don’t have any idea why it did that; neither the folders being backed up nor the destinations were even on the system hard drive. I’m going to contact Cobian and see if it’s a bug, or what. In the mean time I guess I will be doing my back-ups manually.
Comment by Daryl — November 14, 2006 @ 9:47 am