Do I Have A Virus

[Johnny Moron]

I use windows 98 SE with an old (very old) Pentium 1 processor. Until very recently I used Outlook Express as my e-mail client; now I have switched to web mail access only.

My problem is this. When trying to open ANY of the options in the control panel (ie, internet options), I get a message saying "access to the specified device, path, or file is denied". The problem began about 2 weeks ago.

I have swept my system using the latest reference file / virus definitions for Adaware 6 and Avast and have found nothing wrong.

I assume that I DO have some sort of virus, but what I can to remove it or to counter the damge it has done in disabling my access to control panel functions?

All help wil be gratefully received as no one as yet has been able to offer anyhting positive.

[lopburi3]

Am no expert and have more than my share of troubles trying to use OE with Win 98SE (have upgraded to XP and no problems now but if you system is really as old as it sounds you might not be able to take that route). Is it Outlook Express that is giving you problems? If so I would remove and then download/install new copy and see if that corrects the problem. Should only take an hour or so and often the simple things work.

[randyksf]

here are some basic things you can do.

*** BACK UP Your important files********

1) Get rid of all your junk on the system. I.e *.tmp and ~*.* files.

2) Make sure you have enough system resources IE Ram and hard drive space.

3) do a chkdsk /f

4) Defrag

I have seen this error b4 and it turned out to be a bad section on the hard drive, corrupting a system file. Back up you data soon. Just in case.

It really doesn’t sound like a virus. Corruption of something is more likely.

If it were me and if you have all the software. I would format your system and reload it. This should fix the problems if there is not hardware failure.. A good chk disk and drfrag can help out a lot.

If cash is a huge issue You can find new used systems for cheep. heck you can have a great new one built at Panttip for 15k or less. The only reason is a computer has a life of 3 - 4 years. Yours is about 7 years old if not a lot more, sounds like you got your money out of it ten fold.

[randyksf]

On point I did not make. After you have a system for few years you have most likly installed a lot of applications and removed some of them. WinX is sill a dos based system and the uninstallers poor at best.

After time goes by you end up with a lot of junk embedded in the OS. By formatting and reinstalling the OS you can speed up your system.

If you want to upgrade to a faster system you find you web acts a lot faster. If not, a light program is Opera 7.x it's a great browser and really is light on system resources.

Download the Java version and I think you will be happy.