I have an HP computer (which, imho, is half the problem right there, but theres nothing I can do about that), and lately my computer has been acting strange. But before we get to lately, we have to talk about recently, as in the past 6-9 months. During this time, my computer has had a few odd habits. For example, when logging on to certain XP accounts (certain as in it only happens on about half of them), the background loads but nothing else. You have to open taskmanager and go to processes and end explorer.exe, then go to applications, new task, and put explorer in and run it, causing the rest of the desktop to load. Also, again on certain accounts (with some overlap but not completely the same accounts), taskmanager will disappear as soon is it is opened. Also, I have windows XP, so I download logon studio a long time ago, and made it so it has one of four different login screens. For these past months, it for some reason was stuck with the same one over and over again, never changing.
Now it seems all of that has changed: some accounts no longer require the explorer switch, task manager disappears more often, and the random logon screen is random again. Also, I my account, programs start up at startup that used to not start up. (Note that these are programs that are on my computer and start up on other accounts, just not on mine normally).
All these things are minor details, and not that big of a deal. The real problem is now with the internet, which works only for a few minutes after logging in, then stops. It will load the page for a while, then try to load an msn search for the page, then try to load things like www.<whateverpage>.edu/org/com etc., then finally get the page not found error. If I get on something like AIM when the internet is working and leave it on, then after a while I can't access pages or make any new connections, but I can talk on AIM just fine. I'm trying to download Windows updates right now, but it keeps cutting out before the download can start. Has anyone had similar problems in the past, or have any ideas of what to do?
By the way, I think I might have a clue as to why these things started. A day or two ago I downloaded a hack for an older version of Diablo II (1.08) to test on an old single player install. I thought it might be a virus, so I did one of those free online scans. The program came out clean, but it said there was a virus in memory, bio32.exe, which it autodeleted. All of the changes have occured after this, so I thought that maybe bios32.exe may be a file that was a dependency for something else, or was linked to the problems that I have. Does anyone know what bios.exe is for? Or is not really anything, just the name of the virus/trojan?
