I recently reinstalled XP because of what i thought was a spyware problem that i couldnt clean or remove via the registry, ive reinstalled xp 3 times this week and kept the box offline and found that the problem isnt spyware related and is still occuring
although i did find spyware with a couple of apps before the 1st format, the problems didnt stop, so i then wiped.
I have an old P4 3.2ghz and a crappy Asrock P4VM900-Sata2 Board
and 1GB-2x512mb ram, i have sound but its been disabled all the time because i hate onboard sound and have a sound card anyway, (creative) the onboard lan ive been using fine, ive tried today swapping both the ddr2 sticks out for a different brand and this has had no effect, i also have quite alot of usb devices so ive tried removing all but the essentials, Keyboard & Mouse obviously
explorer still restarts randomly
i say randomly because sometimes i get the msg after boot, and sometimes i can go for a few hours before the icons dissapear and reload and it does it yet again.
the other very strange thing is, i have on every install i have done, got an unknown device, i have no idea what it is as im sure ive installed everything, and upon emailing asrock who werent much use i was told to remove it, i removed it and it returned, they also told me to load the drivers from the cd, which i had already done, lan, onboard gfx etc, i didnt need onboard sound as its disabled in the bios so didnt bother with drivers.
when i tried making the wizard search the disc for a driver for the unknown device it didnt find anything.
the last thing is, even though i have 3 internal hard drives, 2 of them, for some unknown reason are shown as removable, they are on the taskbar safely remove hardware icon!?
I have 2 USB WD MY Book Pro's but these are unplugged, and havent been plugged in yet on this install, i have firefox, antivirus and drivers installed at this time, not much else
The newest bits of the box are the motherboard and psu if thats of any relevance
any help or suggestions greatly appreciated
stavr0s