xp box giving me lots of exe errors...

[cha0]

so my girlfriends dad calls me in the computer room this morning to show me this problem he is having with his XP box. it loads up fine till the users screen. after he clicks on the administrator user account it goes to the desktop and you get the cursor with the hourglass for like 5 minutes. in this 5 minute time if you pull up the task manager everything is running at 100%. then after the hour glass goes away you start getting errors. the first time he showed it to me we counted 21 errors. heres an example

ymsgr_tray.exe

the instructions at "0x00401546" referenced at memory of "0x00000000". the memory could not be "read".

please press ok to terminate the process blah blah blah


all of the 21 errors had the same body message. some of them just had different numbers and letters in the first 2 perenthases. some of the other errors include...

jusched.exe
explorer.exe
ituneshelper.exe
iexplorer.exe
agrsmmsg.exe


i started looking them up. i found things like jusched.exe is a java file and you can stop the error by turning off the automatic updates in java. i guess that file gets corrupt sometimes.

then the weird part. i clean up the pc. delete all the programs that they didnt use or were taged as "rarley" used, run disk cleanup, disk defrag, ad aware, and regcure. i shut down, reboot, and its a comletly diffent list of errors. all with that same body.

considering this just started out of nowhere im sure all these files didnt just happen to get corrupted all at the same time. something had to have happended.

anyone have any ideas?

 

[porterjw]

>explorer.exe

That's a bit concerning to me. Explorer is the GUI that Microsoft uses. It's very hard for someone to accidentally corrupt it from original settings.

>considering this just started out of nowhere im sure all these files didnt just happen to get corrupted all at the same time. something had to have happended.

My first guess would be a virus of some sort. You mentioned steps you took to fix the problem, but didn't mention virus scan. If you haven't already, I'd do that ASAP. Other than a virus, it's possible that your actual HDD is corrupted. You can check the status of your drive(s) by going into My Computer, then right-clicking on the drive and selecting Properties at the bottom of the list. When the new window opens, select the Tools Tab and the Error Checking option will be at the top of the list. Depending on how you have your OS set up and how in-depth you select the error checking scanning to go, it may prompt you that it will do it on the next startup. If it does, just reboot and let it go to work.

Best case scenario: it's a virus that AV will take care of, then you run RegClean, adaware, and the others again.
Worst case: you'll need to re-install due to either unrecoverable data for whatever reason, or a corrupt HDD.