Quote - DOn't get me wrong, I do appriate the suggestions, but when you start bitching at others for having the same suggestion, it makes it hard to find the help. Don't "Great mind think alike"?

My post wasn't that sparked such problems actually wasn't bitching about others posting the same thing. I pointed out that it wasn't really nescessary to parrot parts of my suggestion (which it wasn't) and then tried to point out that simplifyin it to a quick and easy fix would more than likely lead to more problems down the road (which I had tried to cover in the initial post).  I was trying to save you the potential headaches and problems I have seen from the Virus family that often causes these symptoms. I have had numerous infected computers exhibiting these symptoms over the last two years brought to me for repairs, and tried to impart in my first few posts some of the pitfalls you might face if not cautious and thourough in finding and removing it.  Usually by the time these symptoms exhibit, the damage is already fairly catastrophic and there are already numerous keyloggers and backdoor trojans spread throughtout the core windows files (hence why it freezes at a black screen).  I had many repeat customers because after cleaning the computers the owners had then restored from infected backup disks that were made while the machine was infected (hense why I warned against backing up before going through thourough steps to insure there wasn't a virus).  More than a few were already made severely worse due to improper attempts to remove them, not just by the owners, but by "technicians" working in the nerd herds of notable chain stores - attempts made by booting to the infected windows and then running the anti-virus (hence why I noted several times it wouldbe best to boot from a clean USB recovery device made on a clean computer).  Much of this was explained in my first point which was then simplified.

As for it being a hardware issue this is highly unlikely (not impossible though) because one of the most sinister though inocuous things you mentioned was that McAfees resident shield keeps getting turned off. Whenever any of your security programs, be they Anti-virus components, firewalls, anti-spyware, or blocklist managers seem to stop functioning properly, or fail to start with windows when previously working, it is 99.99% likely a virus.  Admitedly, in the numerous cases I did handle, slightly fewer than 10% turned out to be a bizare coincidence of hardware failure coupled with software conflict - in one case due to a faulty software driver - but this was 3 machines out of around 30 to 40 I worked on with these symptoms.  Of those, slightly more than 10% were irretrievably damaged do to improper attempts to recover or clean them - resulting in worsening infections, and complete corruption of the Master Boot Record and Partition Table on the Hard Drive.

The reason I posted in the first place was because I just got done working on such a situation this past January, and it was my brothers computer. He had let a friend try to recover it who merely ran an online virus scan - and although it did identify some of the virus, it improperly removed critically damaged and infected windows components resulting in the computer ceasing to function even in safe mode after reboot.  Prior to the scan, his symptoms were almost identical to what you described - including being able to boot to safe mode and then reboot using last known good configuration for a time.

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