XP Pro Running SLOOOOOW

[at1105]

Working on a Dell Inspiron 530 that was supposedly only booting into Safe Mode. Upon startup it went straight into normal boot and quickly to the desktop with no issues. That quickly changed as I get the hour glass when I move the pointer over the taskbar. Clicking an icon or right clicking anything takes literally minutes to respond and sometimes it never responds. HDD activity light stays solid. Task Manager shows little to no CPU usage when idle and little memory usage as well.

I booted into safe mode and checked for malware and viruses which were minimal. No major infections. Still the performance is horrific. I have since thrown everything I have at it in safe mode (Rkill, Adw, RogueKiller, AVG, MBAM, TDSSKiller, and a half dozen more) to try and uncover an infection but it's clean. Safe mode runs perfect and is very responsive. I have defragged it, ran chkdsk, and ran several HDD tests which results showing it's ok. It's still seriously struggling. Any ideas?

 

[mr m]

When I rule out malware and hardware I start looking at AOL or Norton as the culprit. Any broken appl can cause this.

Make sure you test or better yet, swap out memory. Temporarily disable or remove any AV. Maybe a broken update or newly installed appl. Try system restore.

 

[Moltuae]

Is performance poor in Safe Mode too? If not, I'd run a basic startup with msconfig and see how it is with minimal services and programs running.

Also, does it have any additional drives attached (internally or externally)? Having a failing/faulty drive connected, even if it's not the system drive, can cause similar symptoms.

And, perhaps more importantly, have you checked the logs?

 

[NYJimbo]

Sounds like one of the "protector" viruses/junkware.

Is it safe to assume you brought up task manager, show processes from all users" and then sorted on CPU descending to look for anything weird ?

Don't be fooled by things like "WindowsUpdater.exe" which is not TrustedInstaller or by fake search indexers.

Fire up autoruns and look for anything weird. Do a quick view of services and also check installed programs for anything that claims to be a browser protector or anything recent with a name that feels like junkware and uninstall it.

If you can try to run hitman pro kickstart or slave the drive to another machine and do a few different scans to see if you suddenly see more bad guys than you did when the drive was live under its own O/S.

I get these kind of machines EVERY DAY and once we rule out hardware it ends up being something like the above.