Computer Won't Shut Down

Published on April 3, 2006 By PoSmedley In Personal Computing

I don't know what is happening. First..Photoshop started getting a little buggy. Then when I went to shut down the computer, it wouldn't. It wouldn't restart or shutdown, so I manually shut it down. When I rebooted i got this message instead of my logon screen...
parse error ';' at line 173

I had to click on it a few times to get to logon and when I did, it was WindowsXP's regular logon.

I tried to do a system restore, but again, it will not shut down or restart.

Comments (Page 2)

aimzzz

on Apr 04, 2006

Sometimes, I guess you just gotta bite the bullet and start from scratch.

Lantec

on Apr 05, 2006

Sounds like you need to appeal to yraG (Gary) for some technical advice. Anything that says backdoor sounds like a Trojan to me and no amount of "recovery" will get rid of it if it's got into your restore points.

Kevin_C

on Apr 05, 2006

I noticed Avast scans deleted files

I'm pretty sure if you empty your recycle bin it won't scan them. Files in your recycle bin aren't really deleted, just relocated.

yrag

on Apr 05, 2006

'Hours' for a scan? I don't think so, even on a bad day. Unless you have hundreds of thousands of files, that's way out of bounds. That said, you're not going to fix anything until you turn System Restore off (you will lose all your restore points...not that it really matters at this point). After you turn it off, re-boot into safe mode and run Ewido (or any other security proggie you have) from there.

Lantec

on Apr 05, 2006

Gary to the rescue!

seldomseen

on Apr 05, 2006

" virii "...!..lol!..This has been happening to me lately, the last few weeks, glad to see some comments. This main PC is all "whitebox" homebuilt by me so I haven't a clue why. Doesn't happen all the time, just one in five or ten shutdown/restarts, usually after a particularly heavy session of Photoshop-Word/internet cut'n'paste/scanning, etc, to make a term paper for my daughter, etc. I've been hitting Start>Shut down>Shut Down/Restart as usual, and it will go back to desktop, remove a few icons from systray, Sysmetrix, Rainy, OD+, but not CXP, icons, or WB 5, then hang. I wait, an hour sometimes... I then open Task Manager and it's not showing any programs in the first page (I don't usually then go to Running Tasks, too daunting) try to Shut Down from the TM taskbar. It doesn't work so I reach up and mash the Power On button on the case, wait for the smell of burning insulation/chips, flipflops, doghairs, dust bunnies/kitties or whatever, and it goes to sleep pretty as you please...go outside in the snow, smoke a Camel, wait a minute and Power On, F8, and run all the tools from Start>My Computer>C:\Properties(shows the piechart of my C:\ )...Restart and mutter the short form of the Serenity Prayer: "f___ i_!".

Can't wait for the PC to get built on an electron, quantum-mech style ("it works if you don't look at it...??!!!), get it implanted,contact-lens HUD, chip-and-store myself for future generations (immortality!...)... bottom line: "in a hundred years, nobody'll know the difference anyways".[looks out window,EMT van outside, guys with white strappy jacket coming at a run....]

gotta go, there's someone at the d

Alpha Tellurian

on Apr 05, 2006

It's possessed
Any split-pea soup gushing from the floppy drive?

LOL, that's some silly shite. Poor guy needs anti-spyware and you got him running for a priest.

AtlanticCanadianScot

on Apr 05, 2006

hey Po : as a 'whatever it takes' measure, try doing a scan with your purchased version of Spyware Doctor instead of your recent choice of Adaware & see what that turns up;Lantec & GraffiX-MajjiK are onto something in their comment re 'trojans';it has been my experience as we have discussed that this is one of the finest Spyware/Trojan detector/removers....let me know your progress

Majic7

on Apr 05, 2006

SureDelete deletes the ghost stuff left over when you uninstall a program or delete a file. The stuff that allows you to retrieve accidently deleted items. It's all still in there somewhere. I tried it out after reading Starkers other thread about it and it does work. It cut my scan time with Avast almost in half. Just be sure to run SD Disk and not the other parts of the program or you will permanently delete things you don't want to.

starkers

on Apr 05, 2006

I'm pretty sure if you empty your recycle bin it won't scan them. Files in your recycle bin aren't really deleted, just relocated.

Kevin, I found out that AV proggies do scan deleted files because I watched Avast scanning a whole bunch of walls I had deleted after resizing them from 600 x 800 to 1024 x 768.....and on that same drive, system files from an uninstalled OS were also being scanned. After running Sure Delete those files were no longer present and did not appear in the scan....prior to this Avast was scanning 2 million + files, now its scanning under 1 million after cleaning the 8 partitions on each of my 3 Hard Drives.

AtlanticCanadianScot

on Apr 06, 2006

Thx much to Majic7 & Starkers : in attempting to assist Po I ended up helping myself with a troublesome, awkward, uneven & corrupted boot process during sys tray load; I thought it was due to customizing my Control Panel w IP but after running the SureDelete all glitches are history & the boot process smooth as silk

Kevin_C

on Apr 06, 2006

Starkers, that's got to be annoying... The only way I can think that Avast would be able to do that is if it walked the entire surface of your HDD looking for the beginning of a file and then scanning each next section because deleting the file should remove it's record from the FAT table at the very least which is technically the way programs like Avast should be finding files to scan. Anyway, I guess all I'm trying to say is it would annoy me to no end if my A/V scanner decided to scan files I've deleted and are no longer in my recycle bin. Anywho, my A/V proggy of choice NOD32 does not seem to have this habit so I'm happy about that because my file server has over 1.2 TB of HD space and it would take a week to scan all the files I've deleted and then rewritten on those drives..

joeKnowledge

on Apr 06, 2006

You OS might be corrupted at this point. I read that you did a repair, is that correct? Did you put the XP CD and boot your computer with it and then when Windows XP ask you to full install, you selected yes? From there, XP asked if you want to do a repair and you select yes?

Before you do this (but it might save time if you do a repair first), back up all data important to you and do the following... it might help. (By the way, you shouldn't loose anything by repairing the OS, but just in case save important files).

Get these programs:
Process Explorer
HiJack This
Object Desktop Drive Scan
Spybot Search And Destroy
Microsoft Defender Anit Virus

Boot in safe mode.

Run these utilities from the START >> RUN box:
services.msc
msconfig.exe
regedit

Any setting, folders, names that look odd, check them out. Check them from from automatically starting up, make sure windows messenger is disabled (in the services.msc app).

Run HijackThis

Again, any names, entries or what have you that look odd, make a note of it.

Run Stardock Drive Scan and see any wierd looking folder names... then delete them (or rename them). The ones that DON'T allow you to are the prime suspects

Run Process Explorer:
This should tell you every process that is running on your computer. Sometimes these virii have 2 (two) proceses that basically restarts the other proces if you delete or end the other process. So you actually would have to stop BOTH.

ONCE YOU HAVE YOUR LIST OF CRAZY NAMES, DELETE THEM. Delete them from HiJack This, delete them from regedit (also use regedt but deleting will be done in regedit). You might have to actually stop (not delete, just stop from the seervices window or from Process explorer) a microsoft svhost in order to delete the alien process but leave that as a last hope.

Now run Spybot and delete some more
Now run MS anti spyware and remove whatever else
Now run one anti virus software (do not have 2 or more anit virus software platforms installed at one time)

If your system still isn't running properly, repair it with the XP boot CD again.

joeKnowledge

on Apr 06, 2006

I'm sort of tired so maybe my instructions are a little off... but the repair option is a good bet.

You might want to read this eWeek article -
Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impossible
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1945808,00.asp

Backing up your computer has just become a burden like spam email.

starkers

on Apr 06, 2006

According to feedback from family and friends I told about this issue, it seems Avast is not the only AV proggie that scans deleted files. My sister still uses Norton and cut her scan times considerably after running Sure Delete....my niece uses AVG and reports the same result, scan times reduced by half after cleaning her drives of old data.

This is an explanation from the makers of Sure Delete.......

Sometimes "delete" means "kinda sorta delete." When you drag a file to the Recycle Bin, you only move it to a new location. Even when you empty the bin, your files are still retrievable by Undelete utilities. Sure Delete permanently deletes that data from your drive. Whether you want to shred sensitive information or free up resources on your hard drive, this program ensures that it's done permanently. Rather than simply deleting file references on your computer, the program actually destroys the data itself. Sure Delete offers a wizard-style interface that guides you through the process of deleting files, cleaning up your hard drive in minutes. Sure Delete supports the FAT12, FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS disk formats.

I'm not tech savvy enough to explain why some AV proggies scan deleted files, but I do know that the OS cannot completely remove them from the drive, even after reformatting, so if an undelete proggie can locate and retrieve them, then I suppose AV proggies, which are designed to scan all files for virii, would also locate and therefore scan them.

Perhaps someone with more knowledge than I can shed more light on this.....but Sure Delete most certainly removed the remnants of previously installed files, OSes and recylcers to cut my AV scan times by more than half.

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