I had to reformat twice !!
Friday, September 16, 2011 by frankell | Discussion: Personal Computing
It never happened before :
all the system restore points disappeared, every bookmark opened in different commercial links, every browser search returned to the first empty page
all my cleaning and back up applications unloaded just after the launch and the exes in their folders were not more the same .
I tried the safe mode and to restore from the original disk but nothing changed
I was only able to manually copy my data to an external drive, only few at the time
then after the first reformat I had only 1 resolution (800x600) so huge that the DriverMax buttons were out of the desktop !
I went on with the second reformat and it was ok ... 
but I don't' even know and yes I would really like to know the name of that very big ...hole ! 
Reply #2 Friday, September 16, 2011 12:59 PM
I'd suggest a Malwarebytes scan asap. Sounds like a really nasty piece of malware.
Download it here: http://www.malwarebytes.org/
It's free.
What did you download/open, etc?
If Malwarebytes finds something, and even if it doesn't) get to another computer and change all your passwords and alert your credit card company as well as your bank ASAP.
Don't delay.
Reply #3 Friday, September 16, 2011 2:17 PM
I guess that after having reformat twice I really should have a clean OS
and actually everything is ok on my "new" XP !! 
... well the hard drive is not very young (4 years) but I really hope it will not be my third hard drive death in 9 months
regarding the bank issues I never keep any sensible data on my PC and I only use (very rarely indeed) a rechargeable card
many thanks for your advices Philly and DrJBL !!
somebody knows that f....... name ? 
Reply #4 Friday, September 16, 2011 2:37 PM
frankell I would suggest checking for disk errors to see if it shows any problems like bad sectors. It wouldn't hurt and it would atleast answer whether your disk is starting to have problems. It also will help zero in on where the problem is, hardware or you had a nasty malware or virus. 
Reply #5 Friday, September 16, 2011 2:44 PM
frankell:
Run the Malwarebytes scan.
Then, "Run as Administrator" your cmd - chkdsk /f /r (or the XP equivalent)
Reply #6 Friday, September 16, 2011 2:44 PM
Mine did a similar thing the other day on XP using Pale Moon 6.0, but I did not notice any .exe issues other than Pale Moon itself. I had to uninstall it, run CCleaner and TuneUp 1-Click Maintenance, reboot, run the cleaners again to make sure and then installed Firefox 6.0. Problems went away.
Reply #7 Friday, September 16, 2011 4:36 PM
thanks again for the feedback Philly, DrJBL and LightStar !
MWB was OK
Runned full Chkdsk on reboot and the system is integer
... hope for a really long time
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Reply #1 Friday, September 16, 2011 12:57 PM
Could it be that the hard drive is about to die? That's just a guess on my part. I haven't seen anyone mention this in the forums.
Hopefully someone will come along that will know more about it like yrag.