Octopus Overlords

My cursor has the hourglass next to it flashing on and off in time with the flashing of my pc light on my modem. Plus everything on the internet is stuttering. My cable light is steady, but my internet is really bad right now. Could it be caused by this stupid flashing hourglass cursor thing, or is it the internet? The hourglass is flashing even when I'm not on the internet though, and I haven't the slightest idea why it suddenly started doing this. Any ideas? Upon checking, it's not just the internet that is slow, it's everything I do on my computer. Just typing this, I could type a whole sentence before it showed up here. I just ran trojan hunter on my computer, and I'm clean. Any help appreciated as this is really driving me crazy trying to figure out what's wrong.

Well if you have XP you could just do a quick system restore to see if that fixes it.

Thanks. I did a system restore already thought. I was on GatewayTech Support, and he thought it was because when I installed Vampire Bloodlines, it installed directX 9.0c, and that was when my trouble started. I did a system restore. He gave me a link to get directX 9.0b, but because of the lag, I couldn't save the log. I googled for it, but all off the ones I found sound like they're for technicians. He also said I would need to re-install my ATI drivers. Does anyone have a link where I can get 9.0b? Microsoft just has the new 9.0c's up on their site.

Do you have any games that came with DX 9b? I would still think there has to be another underlying problem causing your problems as DirectX 9c is working just fine for most people.

I've learned after having to do reinstalls a quite a few times in the past to keep all the stuff I would need to backup neatly organized in case I needed to do another reinstall of the OS. I know there are faster ways like keeping the OS on a seperate partition but I've yet to go that far, probably should I guess. My point? Anytime you've spent more than 2 hours trying to fix a software problem it probably would have been faster to start with a fresh install, after all that is the very first thing companies like Alienware do when PC's are shipped back to them for repair.

If the hourglass is coming up in time with your modem, there is a process that is running intermittantly and attempting to access the internet. It could be malware or just a regular program trying to hit a server that is down. Don't know.

DX9c shouldn't cause symptoms like your'e describing.

Do you have Zone Alarm? That might help identify what is trying to call out.

Sorry it's taking so long getting back on here, but my internet connection is shot. It takes 5 minutes to load a page, and then 5 more to go back to another page. I do have a cable tech coming out tomorrow to see if it's the internet. If not, guess I got to call Gateway, because I can't figure it out. I finally downloaded SP2, hoping it would fix this, but it doesn't. Updated all my drivers, defraged, ran ad-aware and spybot, and I'm at a loss to figure out what's going on. I turned off the SP2 firewall for windows, so if I install Zonealarm, it should work, right? I'd like to at least check and see whats acsessing my computer, or trying too. Be back when I can.

If I install ZoneAlarm, do I need to disable the firewalls I've got? Just the general ones that you enable for your connections to your computer?

Zone Alarm is a software firewall. So if you have one on your router or externally, you don't need to disable it.

If you are running Zone Alarm, you don't need your other software firewalls (like Windows XP) running. You don't have to disable them, but it's probably a good idea since they'll be bumping into each other.

Last sugestion would be to run a virus scan, since you did AdAware and Spybot.

I did a virus scan, and it didn't find anything. I just got off of a live talk over the computer with a Gateway tech, and he had me start msconfig, go to start up, and disable everything that was running. I was sceptical, but it worked. Now how do I know what I can have running, and what I can't. I guess that would be just a try one and repeat the process, right?
No more flashing hourglass, that's amazing, but now how do I find out which one was causing the problem? Thanks also for the help and for checking out this thread again even though I was having such a hard time getting here.

snoleopard wrote:I did a virus scan, and it didn't find anything. I just got off of a live talk over the computer with a Gateway tech, and he had me start msconfig, go to start up, and disable everything that was running. I was sceptical, but it worked. Now how do I know what I can have running, and what I can't. I guess that would be just a try one and repeat the process, right?
No more flashing hourglass, that's amazing, but now how do I find out which one was causing the problem? Thanks also for the help and for checking out this thread again even though I was having such a hard time getting here.

Just choose selective startup and reenable stratup items until the annoying one comes back. I always disable 75% of the crap that adds itself to the startup items. I hate crap in my taskbar.

Go to MSconfig and startup. Write down all the objects in there that you have unchecked when the system works. Check them all again. Restart. Hit ctrl+alt+del. Click on processes. Go through the list and end the ones on your list one at a time until the hourglass/problem goes away. The last one you ended before it stops it most likely the culprit. You can also click on the networking tab there and see what kind of network activity is going on.

Sounds like you have some malware dialer.

Try Search&Destroy and AdAware:

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/

Edited to add that in a worst-case-scenario your computer has been taken over by a hacker and is now a "zombie". If this is the case, the easiest thing is probably to back up any data (not apps) you want to save and reformat + reinstall the entire machine.