I am back already. I hadn't really looked over the board but wanted to pass this along. I have been into computers for almost 20 years. A few weeks ago we started having random disconnects with our DSL connection and while doing stuff the computer would go "rogue" and reboot itself without warning.

This computer has Motherboard: Abit AMD KR7A133 4DDR ATX VIA KT266A chipset, Video Card: Xtasy 64MB nVidia Geforce 4
AGP mx420 from Visiontek, Soundblaster Audigy Gamer 24bit, 512mb RAM. It is run with Windows ME. (no comments from the peanut gallery .... Windows ME works for us.

Anyway, I was frustrated as to why this was happening. I have tweaked this computer for optimum performance. Got rid of unnecessary startup items (you can manually load later).

One day I happened for some reason to bring up a program that shows items running. It's called ilProcess Viewer. I noticed an odd entry. spooler32.exe was running. We don't print much on the computer so this seemed strange. I put the file in a search engine and came up with a thing from McAfee. We use Norton's Systemworks 2002 Pro.

It said that a trojan drops a file MSspool.exe and some registry entries. I looked over the windows directory but that wasn't there. It apparently executes from a document with a .jpg in it. Well we never get docs with .jpg's in them. I checked the registry and it appeared clean except for one entry that looked cryptic but not what McAfee said it would be named or even close to it. I don't have any programs with "that" name so I deleted the item.

Then it struck me in looking at the SIZE of the spooler32.exe file. It was 156kb. I took the ME disk and went to the .cab file where it was located. The ME disk file was 44kb. I immediately copied over the file and replaced the one in the windows directory.

Problem solved. No more rogue reboots and no more disconnects from the net. I have no clue as to why this happened but hear of people having reboot problems or disconnects and most of the time they get so frustrated that they reformat the hd and everything goes back to working. It might be something to take a quick look at.

Regards,

Chuck

whoa, interesting story there. Not too long ago I was experience a problem kind of like yours, one day my computer was acting up on me and disconnecting me and also rebooting. I figured it had to be a virus, norton didnt seem to detect anything, neither did McAfee, so I left it alone. A few days later it was even worse.

I decided to figure out the problem: I looked over my hard drive and found some suspicious files that I never had, I pressed ctrl+alt+del and checked what programs were currently running, it showed a WININIT.sys and WININIT.exe (took up lots of RAM), I looked for the file but couldnt just delete it because I knew the trojan was all over my hard drive. I did a port scan and found my port 137, 138 open. This port is usually never open, after doing some research, I figured out I had this trojan called WININIT (a.k.a MS3016.exe). The article said it opens up your port 137 and it makes it available to anyone.
So I looked at the registry files and found them clean, kinda like you did, so I really just restored my PC. A week later I found the computer still had the virus (stupid me ) so the day later I just restored again and installed XP which the virus cant run in. I looked for the virus using XP's advanced searching, found it, replaced it. And now my computer is working fine. up to the moment at least.

thats what I get for downloading my warez, I stopped though
still have port scanners and stuff though and I got rid of norton and mcafee, too many errors and it doesnt detect crap.
I just manually detect trojans now and do port scans and registry checks every once in a while

-Josh

aha I have had similar problems, where my pc rebooted alot without warning. my answer was that my power supply wasn't enough for all the components in my pc (i have manually upgraded a lot )

Hi there,

I didn't want people to think that it was a fix for a lot of the problems. There are so many things to look for if your computer goes rogue.

However, it's something to take a quick look at. Since we are using Windows ME the spooler32.exe file is located in the windows directory/folder so if you or someone you know has random reboots or disconnects it won't hurt to check it out and see.

Regards,

Chuck

i was using ME too, I hated ME. It causes too many errors, even though I have to admit it is a pretty good platform for webdesigning.

thats why now I have XP!

where is the advanced search in xp?