Comp problem, any suggestions?

[righteous_slave]

I've got an old (4 yrs) HP Pavilion, still running Win98, and have been having a lot of problems as of late. The most obvious symptom is that very often, when we are shutting down, a "busy program" box pops up without a name of the program in the window. Waiting does nothing, we just have to tell it to end the task. Also, diferent settings keep getting changed, and the comp will try to dial up when it is turned on. We have run a couple of virus scans and spyware scans, deleted a lot of files, and are still having problems. Any ideas?

[Mithrandir]

format c:

Sorry, but there's only so much you can do to clean a system. When it get's really bad, you just have to delete everything. Make a backup of your data, then use the system restore disks that came with the machine. Once the OS is installed, go DIRECTLY to the Microsoft Critical Updates page and download all the updates for your machine. That will take care of the problem, but you'll have to reload all your data and programs. Make sure you don't copy any executables over, or you'll end up with the same virus.

The next question is, "How did you get this virus/spyware?" If you use internet explorer, or outlook, don't. Change to mozilla or firefox or SOMETHING. Those programs don't use the same stuff that M$ includes in IE - the buggy software that allows malicious people/programs to take over your computer.