PocketMatrix

Ok. My comp is not well. I dont know what happened to it, but I'll tell the whole story and maybe one of you guys can help me out. Sorry if this is too long.

Today I was happily Photoshop-ing away, removing people i didn't like from family pictures, when my comp was not really acting right. It was going really slow, and lots of pop-up ads were coming out of nowhere, and there were lots of them. So i Ctrl-Alt-Del and noticed a weird process running which seemed to just be a random name, like Ywk.....exe, that's all i remember. I closed it, figuring it was adware, and it closed no problem, but then another weird process opened up, seeming to be randomly generated. I closed that one too and then another one opened up. I fought my comp like this for a few hours, running adaware trying to clean things up, which it removed many programs, but they would still come back. My comp seemed to be running ok at this point, still some weird behavior, and still the weird processes. Then thigns started to get pretty bad it was just really slow and AIM crashed about every 5 seconds. So i tried to download some antivirus software, Norton to be exact, and it would install up to the piont where it would try to actuvate the services and then crash and say it couldn't do it. So i tried about three times and it didn't work so i rebooted. And then it got to the black and white, "Loading Windows 2000..." and then it would quickly tell me that windows was corrupt and it couldn't find C:\Winnt\System32\Config\System. I tried to get the win2k cd and do a restore but it wasn't quite working, so i just installed win2k into another dir, winnt2, which is what im runnign now, and things are working, but my old windows is trashed. I tried copying that file from this install into the old one, and then when i tried to boot it, it would jsut quick jump to a normal windows 2000 screen, like right before you log in, but then it just reboots. Any ideas?

You got owned pretty badly. Just salvage what you can and start again.

I fixed it! All the crap on my HD, as in the spyware, adware, and 7 viruses that Norton found, filled up my registry to it's maximum limit, and I guess that screwed it up enough to make it not start. I messed around a bit and copied an old version of the file in and now it's almost back to normal, except a lot of the drivers for stuff i had installed no longer exist, but oh well that's easily fixable.

You've got MAJOR problems if you fill the registry. You should be able to make it larger though.

You... could throw it out the window and build a new one.

But seriously, you should probably to a complete harddrive wipe and reinstall windows if you have problems like that.