A couple of weeks ago when I switched my PC on, it was suddenly throwing up a bunch of problems that it hadn't been the day before. It appears to be mostly related to Services: once Windows has been up for a couple of minutes, pop-ups appear, saying that scvhost.exe is faulting, the print spooler is faulting; if I look in the system tray, there's no audio as the audio service is not working, Crashplan is unable to connect to its backup engine. etc.
The pop-ups keep appearing all the time the machine is on, as I'm assuming Windows restarts the Services, only for them to fault again.
If I look in Event Viewer (when that's working, sometimes that service fails too) it currently lists 463 errors in the last hour, 2300 in the last 24 hours.
Now these kind of sudden, system-wide failures would indicate to me either some kind of malware infestation or a hardware failure, but I can't find any indication of either and I'm totally at a loss as to what to do next. Here's what I've done so far:
Memtest - ran 16 passes and it indicated one error, on pass 7
Removed DIMMs and replaced with one from another PC - problem still occurred
chkdisk - no errors found
Removed all HDD and DVD drives other than C drive - problem still occurred
Moved C drive to another SATA port and used another cable - problem still occurred
Replaced the BIOS battery - problem still occurred
Malwarebytes - no malware found
Malwarebytes Anti Rootkit - nothing found
TDSSKiller - nothing found
RogueKiller - no infection
JRT - removed a couple of things from Firefox and that's it
Removed all USB devices and hubs, apart from the mouse - problem still occurred
I read that sometimes it could be a problem with Microsoft Security Essentials, so I uninstalled that and it failed when I tried to reinstall it. That's happened with other things too. Nvidia control centre was one of the thing that kept faulting, so I uninstalled that, used Driver Sweeper to completely clean it, then tried to reinstall it - it fails during the install.
There are two other odd symptoms: the first is that Firefox often loses focus but I can't see what's taking it. As I've been typing this I'd look up to see that the text I'd been writing wasn't going into the window as it had lost focus. And if I'm reading a long article, using the mouse wheel to scroll, it'll lose focus so I can't scroll until I click on the window again. The other odd thing is that sometimes I'll click on a program's shortcut and get the message 'stub received bad data'. If I click the shortcut again, the program loads okay.
I've checked the Windows system files and they all seem okay.
Today I went through the Services, disabling all that I could, and setting the others to Black Viper's 'safe' configuration from here: http://www.blackviper.com/service-co...onfigurations/
Then I used msconfig to remove all non-essential programs from startup. I rebooted, and the errors popped up as usual.
I've tried everything I can think of for two weeks and I'm no nearer to locating the source of the problem, let alone fixing it. Sorry this is such a wall of text but there are so many odd symptoms, which all began on the same day, I wanted to include as many as I could.
I couldn't get TSG Sysinfo to provide any data, the window came up empty, and now Speccy crashes when I try to run it and nothing happens if I right-click on Computer and select properties. Add those to the list of failing things. :-(
Any suggestions would be gratefully received.
The pop-ups keep appearing all the time the machine is on, as I'm assuming Windows restarts the Services, only for them to fault again.
If I look in Event Viewer (when that's working, sometimes that service fails too) it currently lists 463 errors in the last hour, 2300 in the last 24 hours.
Now these kind of sudden, system-wide failures would indicate to me either some kind of malware infestation or a hardware failure, but I can't find any indication of either and I'm totally at a loss as to what to do next. Here's what I've done so far:
Memtest - ran 16 passes and it indicated one error, on pass 7
Removed DIMMs and replaced with one from another PC - problem still occurred
chkdisk - no errors found
Removed all HDD and DVD drives other than C drive - problem still occurred
Moved C drive to another SATA port and used another cable - problem still occurred
Replaced the BIOS battery - problem still occurred
Malwarebytes - no malware found
Malwarebytes Anti Rootkit - nothing found
TDSSKiller - nothing found
RogueKiller - no infection
JRT - removed a couple of things from Firefox and that's it
Removed all USB devices and hubs, apart from the mouse - problem still occurred
I read that sometimes it could be a problem with Microsoft Security Essentials, so I uninstalled that and it failed when I tried to reinstall it. That's happened with other things too. Nvidia control centre was one of the thing that kept faulting, so I uninstalled that, used Driver Sweeper to completely clean it, then tried to reinstall it - it fails during the install.
There are two other odd symptoms: the first is that Firefox often loses focus but I can't see what's taking it. As I've been typing this I'd look up to see that the text I'd been writing wasn't going into the window as it had lost focus. And if I'm reading a long article, using the mouse wheel to scroll, it'll lose focus so I can't scroll until I click on the window again. The other odd thing is that sometimes I'll click on a program's shortcut and get the message 'stub received bad data'. If I click the shortcut again, the program loads okay.
I've checked the Windows system files and they all seem okay.
Today I went through the Services, disabling all that I could, and setting the others to Black Viper's 'safe' configuration from here: http://www.blackviper.com/service-co...onfigurations/
Then I used msconfig to remove all non-essential programs from startup. I rebooted, and the errors popped up as usual.
I've tried everything I can think of for two weeks and I'm no nearer to locating the source of the problem, let alone fixing it. Sorry this is such a wall of text but there are so many odd symptoms, which all began on the same day, I wanted to include as many as I could.
I couldn't get TSG Sysinfo to provide any data, the window came up empty, and now Speccy crashes when I try to run it and nothing happens if I right-click on Computer and select properties. Add those to the list of failing things. :-(
Any suggestions would be gratefully received.