THe first is Spyware. You partially ruled that out by running SpyBot, but try running AdAware too just to be sure. Make sure you tell it to update its database.
The second has to do with the "uninstall" folders. As others point out, they're generated by Windows Update, which installs hotfixes (by the way, the blue means they're compressed folders). If it's set to install updates in without warning, it's partly good because it means the machine will be fairly up to date, but it also means it could have installed SP2. This could cause a couple of problems. First, check if it's been installed by opening Windows Explorer and looking under Help->About.
First of all, as it's rather huge, it could be taking up a lot of hard disk space, causing the swap file to be too small. First thing, check there's plenty of free disk space. Second, go to the System control panel, and go to the Advanced tab. Click on performance settings, and change the virtual memory settings. I would suggest for a system with 128MB to set the minimum size to 512MB and the Maximum to 1024MB. But as mentioned above, 128MB really isn't very much for an XP system - suggest an upgrade to at least 256MB would be a worthwhile investment.
The other problem SP2 can cause is that it installs its own firewall. Presumably you have a network firewall, so this is rather redundant, and it can block things you don't want it to in its default configuration. It could be that it's blocking HTTPS, which could be stopping you getting into things you ought to be able to.
SP2's improved security also causes conflicts with quite a number of applications, including quite a few Microsoft ones. Many software vendors have fixes on their websites, but you tend to have to it on an application by application basis.
Of course, it could be nothing to do with any of this. Reinstalling the virus checker is a good start. Reinstalling the OS might help, but you could find by the time you installed and patched (or it patched itself) that you'd be back where you started.
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Date: 2004-11-29 05:16 am (UTC)THe first is Spyware. You partially ruled that out by running SpyBot, but try running AdAware too just to be sure. Make sure you tell it to update its database.
The second has to do with the "uninstall" folders. As others point out, they're generated by Windows Update, which installs hotfixes (by the way, the blue means they're compressed folders). If it's set to install updates in without warning, it's partly good because it means the machine will be fairly up to date, but it also means it could have installed SP2. This could cause a couple of problems. First, check if it's been installed by opening Windows Explorer and looking under Help->About.
First of all, as it's rather huge, it could be taking up a lot of hard disk space, causing the swap file to be too small. First thing, check there's plenty of free disk space. Second, go to the System control panel, and go to the Advanced tab. Click on performance settings, and change the virtual memory settings. I would suggest for a system with 128MB to set the minimum size to 512MB and the Maximum to 1024MB. But as mentioned above, 128MB really isn't very much for an XP system - suggest an upgrade to at least 256MB would be a worthwhile investment.
The other problem SP2 can cause is that it installs its own firewall. Presumably you have a network firewall, so this is rather redundant, and it can block things you don't want it to in its default configuration. It could be that it's blocking HTTPS, which could be stopping you getting into things you ought to be able to.
SP2's improved security also causes conflicts with quite a number of applications, including quite a few Microsoft ones. Many software vendors have fixes on their websites, but you tend to have to it on an application by application basis.
Of course, it could be nothing to do with any of this. Reinstalling the virus checker is a good start. Reinstalling the OS might help, but you could find by the time you installed and patched (or it patched itself) that you'd be back where you started.