Think you're a PC genius? Then boy do I need your help!

Amarynthia

Okay... I'm sure y'all see this comment all the time but... I'm not a PC pro. I know my way around them moderately well but by no means a specialist. An average, experienced PC user. With that said... let me tell you what has myself and SO many of my normally PC savvy friends completely stumped.

I have a dual-core HP PC that runs Windows XP SP2. Roughly five months ago, I purchased Zonealarm after not having virus protection on my PC for a few months. Zonealarm discovered SIX viruses to my horror. Not knowing which was best, to remove them or quarantine them... I chose quarantine. Since then my computer every 15 minutes to few hours... will just start spamming the period key. For example... No matter what I was or wasn't running on my computer, just randomly it would start spamming "........................................................" in any entry field. If I unplugged the keyboard... no help. Restarting SOMETIMES would help but often it took one or two restarts to clear. Then it would be back again in 15 minutes to a few hours once more. Now at the same time... my USBs began to misfunction. My keyboard would blink randomly on and off. So I removed the cool, shiney keyboard I was using and put on a standard $10 "no bells" keyboard. The blinking stopped but dots continued.

Friend who is computer savvy said it could by that my power supply was dying and didn't have enough juice to run everything. So I ordered and installed a little more powerful power supply, which was just in case you ask.. brand new. So for 1 month roughly, upon installing the new power supply... Yay! No dots or blinking keyboard!

Until yesterday.... just randomly and all of a sudden. Nothing newly installed, nothing changed, etc.... the dots returned at random. I opened a browser to check my email, clicked the entry field and "......................." non stop. Trying to type looked like this... "......O.........m.............g........" etc. VERY frustrating. Only thing that fixes it is restarting. I've tried turning off everything but basic windows functions to discover if it was a certain program and nothing worked.

So here's where it gets really good. After restarting, I open the browser and instead of dots.... my browser goes nuts. Rapidly going from fullscreen to regular over and over. So fast that you can't even type, click or close it. I had to use the task manager to shut it down. And its not just Firefox... opened up IE, same thing. Chrome... same thing. So I tried restarting again... and all my computer would do was loop back to restarting after hitting the blue HP screen. I was forced to do a PC Recovery in order to get it to go any further.

So now I have lost numerous files, etc but dealing with it by trying to recover them, thinking hopefully the PC Recovery to factory settings has fixed everything atleast and oh look.... NOPE! DOTS! "................................."

I have absolutely NO clue what in the world is going on. The keyboard has no special drivers and I've changed it out a few times. Four different keyboards and companies. I've unplugged them and the ........ still continues. Even had the windows explorer browser freak out again earlier. Restarting is now a complete pain because sometimes it will and sometimes it goes to the Set Up Dos prompt thingie. Other times it makes me go through Safe Mode to restart it AGAIN even though that's what I was already doing.

I know this is a really long question but OMG if anyone can help me I'd so very very appreciate it. I don't have a lot of money at all. The economy has hit my house hard and I just don't think I can afford to take this to the shop for them to take days to figure out and charge me up the yin yang. If this is something one of you wonderful computer geniuses knows how to fix, I would be SO very very appreciative!!!!

Thank you for any way you can help!

Thrax

Have you reformatted? Reloaded Windows from scratch?

If not, back up your stuff then do that. If that fails, your PC's motherboard is a goner.

Amarynthia

Thrax wrote:

Have you reformatted? Reloaded Windows from scratch?

If not, back up your stuff then do that. If that fails, your PC's motherboard is a goner.

My HP didn't come with a windows disk but i did make the boot discs early on, which was a total of 18 discs. I'm not exactly sure what to do to reformat. Do I make another back up disc set through that same method or do you mean I should try and save my files to discs? Sadly they're so large, I don't think even 50 CD's would cover my just burning info to CDs.

Sorry for sounding like an idiot but.. what do you suggest in "dummy" terms to go about your initial suggestion of reformatting.

Thanks!

Thrax

I would invest in an external hard drive like the kind you can get at a store. Copy your files over to the external hard drive. Once you're sure you have everything saved, just reboot your computer with the first recoery cd in the drive. The recovery system will walk you through a destructive restore.

Amarynthia

Thrax wrote:

I would invest in an external hard drive like the kind you can get at a store. Copy your files over to the external hard drive. Once you're sure you have everything saved, just reboot your computer with the first recoery cd in the drive. The recovery system will walk you through a destructive restore.

Thank you SO much! I'm hoping that will fix it. :P

Out of curiousity... is this a normal thing you see or when a motherboard goes bad, can it just have random effects that differ per computer? I didn't see anything online about either issue being the case for someone else. Thus why I ruled it out as a virus and decided to ask the question here in Hardware.

Thrax

Dying motherboards do batshit crazy things, but I've never in my life seen a virus that exists to spam keys. Either it's windows losing its mind or the mobo because you've ruled out everything else.

Callred

One last thought. IF you actually had infections they may have written parts of themselves to key Windows components. When they were placed in quarantine, the infected files could no longer perform as designed because of bad data.

I really don't care for Zone Alarm personally but that doesn't make it a bad program per se.

Load AVG and after moving your data (bookmarks, email, documents, etc) scan the copies before moving on. Then blow out your system and reinstall. You'll like the way the new build feels anyway. It's always faster and leaner.

One last thing before you blow it out. Be sure you have all of the drivers, especially the network card, before you do. I made that mistake ... once...

willschillin

I'd run malwarebytes.org, download and remove Zone Alarm. I never had any good experiences it. Over paranoid, everythings a virus..... The dots on your screen I think are unrelated. Might be a cable issue or video card driver.

Zone Alarm is a false alarm. If the PC is really only 15 hours old, then its less likely there's a virus on it. My opinion of course.

Gldm

It's possible that a virus could have corrupted something like one of the base system files like usbport.sys and produced the problem when removed, but I don't think that's too likely. You can try booting off a windows CD (anyone's windows CD doesn't have to be one specific for your machine, as long as it's the same version i.e. XP SP2 or Vista), and use the Repair option to try and recopy the system files with good versions. If that doesn't work, you can try a backup and reformat but I think it's more likely a motherboard issue.

The key piece of evidence is the USB ports began to have issues at the same time as the keyboard. Also all the browsers were experiencing problems, including chrome, which is not a common infection target. My guess is the motherboard's southbridge is overheating or defective and it's spamming bad data to the system that looks like a stuck key.