Strange Bahaviour....

The best way for me to describe the few instances of strange behaviour on my machine is to paste the screen shots I took. I have a firewall, run registry clean up (RegScrubXP to be specific) and other than that, other tasks are quite elementary. Web surfing, try to stay on 'safe' sites, Age of Empires (download.com trial version), MS Bootvis and PDF Creation software are the main apps I have installed and use on a regular - semi-regular basis.

One screen that has concerned me the most, occured earlier on tonight: multiple explorer windows kept opening and opening - I went to sort similar tasks together in the taskbar menu and the total turned out to be 52! I then proceeded to close them by closing the entire grouped folder; this happened while I was on the internet, had e-mail open and visited a site I had been to in the past. It seemed as if a page was taking a long time loaded, so I went to simply close it, knowing I would have to re-open the browser to get that portion to work properly, when this occured.

Plus Microsoft Explorer Error screens.

Thank You for your assistance.

P.S. I have disabled some processes/turned them from auto to manual on the recommendation of websites that were praised here on NBR also: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2002

Yet I still have far too many processes running IMO, a topic for a different thread - but who knows, in this may lie the issue.

 

Perhaps it'd be easier to just reformat

 

Have you tried running a virus and spyware scan

 

i'm no expert about this but 1 year ago i had exactly the same problem.. I tried every anti-virus software possible - same thing with anti-spyware, then i figured out a Windows CD was the best choice, it would save a lot of time, and you have a feeling that your computer is completely "clean"

 

thats a weird one......

obviously software based,
more than likely registry, but who knows.
i agree with the above, reformatting is probably your best choice.

Oh, dd u ever try a system restore back to a point u know this wasnt happening? Thats worth a shot too if not.

 

Well, I have the Restore and Recovery backup disks I made before I started installing other apps, that would take me to the original settings. I don't have a just XP disk though. I feel I haven't installed any apps that I don't need. Trying to keep it less cluttered. I have PC Doctor and I defrag via Diskeeper periodically.

 

If anyone has some extra time, preferably with a ThinkPad notebook so they have experience with some apps, and could simply list the startups and services (via msconfig) that can be safely disabled, that would be great. I've used various sites, read up on different processes, yet I've only reduced processed by less than 10. I would really appreciate that.

Thanks

> It just happened again...multiple windows, only this time they came and went. I did not have to close them myself. Well a symtom/sign is when an internet page continues to load and load and doesn't go anywhere...then this happens. I'm thinking about just restoring to factory settings.