Quoting KingFish

The last laptop that was brought to me was so eaten up with spyware that it basically couldn't do anything because the processes were fighting amongst themselves vying for cpu attention to connect to their respective servers or whatever they were doing. One was so pervasive that when I put it on my lan connect it pinged the hell out of everything and kept shutting down/rebooting my router. Some of the spyware had virus like activity in that when I would clear out some processes others would pop up. It took me a while to run multiple passes of norton av (2004 vers cleans out some spyware), ad aware, and spybot search and destroy to get it down to where I could manually take out what I believed were the core files responsible for the behavior. The new spyware/adware stuff out there is particularly malicious nowadays. I believe that laptop only had about 700 or so items that I saw on one pass of ad aware. I could imagine what 1300+ or 2000 items would be like to clean out. At least he had win xp running, I don't think win98 would have withstood the onslaught and be able to not shut down. Have fun cleaning that crap out, I don't envy you hehe.

KingFish

With 98 and 98 SE, one of the things that DO cause not being able to shut down right ARE just what you said, so that, then video drivers, are what I look for these days, many times on Grandma's box as a lot of Grandmas live down in my area. You are correct, KingFish, but in part this is due to the fact that XP can handle more simultaneously ACTIVE and RUNNING processes than 98 ever could (XP can treat more individual functions as threads instead of apps), and can KILL 16 bit lower level processes individually while 98 had to shut down the few process areas it had available for 16 bit or 32 bit to keep from being totally overwhelmed and that gave a good signal in and of itself that the box had malware on it to a large extent. BTW, the ultimate denial of service to a box's owner is O\S destruction.

The older Windows had about 64K for individual process mapping. Newer ones have larger map area, can track more processes. Run a lot of 16 bit in 98, you have very little 32 bit ability at same time. AND vice versa. Overwhelm either, the whole VM used to lock big-time, and still locks sometimes. When the VM hung, the kernel had to mitigate when more than one process tried to use same virtual memory area or an overlappping one.

That in essence is how remote-initiated DOS attacks are done (as differentiated from DDOS, which uses co-opted boxes to mass-attack a common enemy of the co-opting software and its authors), you make an app violate VM rules and spaces defined by mapping of where in RAM or virtualized RAM in swap file, processes are living at each instant. MOST BSODs boil down to this kind of thing. Think vxd as a specially priviliged hardware I\O handling process. Think OCX, DAO, and\ or ActiveX as a GUI or internet or data object function handler that is live-reacting to situations within its scope of function. Illegally working functions cause most BSODs-- XP is better at BSODing more jkust when hardware IS flaky, with 98 half the BSODs were App(s)\VM\Kernel violates, or Kernel\Kernel32 conflicts, or soem of each. most viruses are apps, and the other malware is often using part of what some folks clump into their idea of the term virus (trojan behavior, for instance, is one thing spyware uses as things progress in a massive malware infection).

HTH some to understand how spyware, adware, viruses, worms and trojans are being COMBINED in attacks these days (both in terms of behavior and actual blending of hybrids).

Yes, massive loads of crap are being DELIBERATELY spread around these days.

John D.