Octopus Overlords

Don't know if anyone can help me with this, but if you've got suggestions I'd love to hear them.

Right now my computer is acting very strange whenever I try and interact with a file. If I right click on any file, say, in explorer, the explorer window will crash and drop me to the desktop. The start bar also disappears, and everything takes a couple seconds to come back to normal. If I look in my task manager while I do it, I see explorer.exe disappear, then reappear a few seconds later.

This also happens when I try to delete a file, either by hitting delete, or shift-delete. The odd thing is that it only happens on files only. I can interact with FOLDERS like I always could. Right click menu works, and I can delete them if I want. I can click and drag files around. I just can't right click on them, and I can't delete them.

I'm at a total loss on this one. I've tried removing any programs I could think of that alter the right click menu to no avail. I've tried cleaning out my registry, and running Spybot. I've done hard and soft reboots out the wazoo. Anyone have any other suggestions?

There was a rampant virus about a year or so ago that caused the exact issues you are having. I can't remember exactly which virus it was, but I remember that it did receive a good bit of press, so it was one of the more widespread problems.

I would suggest that you verify your Anti-Virus definitions are up to date and run a virus scan. Also, you can run a scan across the internet via several different Anti-Virus sites, including Symantec / Norton.

If nothing shows up on the virus scan, I think I would remove any Mouse Software that you don't absolutely have to have and try running your mouse as a generic "Compatible Mouse". Some mouse drivers add so many options that they can conflict with Windows and other software.

Hope this helps.

Sherrick

Thanks for the help, but it wasn't a virus. I ended up doing a system restore to before my last windows updates on 10/13 and that fixed whatever it was.

For future reference, if anyone runs into this problem again, my problem was with one of these three WinXP updates:

KB 834707
KB 840987
Software Distribution Service 2.0