Search and Virus Problem

[Basher]

Ok a friend of mine has this problem ...

He is using XP Home on a fairly new laptop ...

When he clicks start > search, nothing happens, nothing appears, no matter how long you waint the search box does not appear.

Any suggestions?

Also he believes he has a worm virus, but norton is not picking it up, any one know of any recent worms which norton is not aware of?

Cheers,

Basher

[Trickle]

Have you had a look on MS knowledge base?

Other than that I would try:
a) Removing it as an option via taskbar properties and then turning it back on.

b) Perhaps switch to classic view? I'm sure I've seen some sort of "use windows 2000 search" as an option, but I cant find it anywhere :/ I also have themes disabled on both my machines, so I cant currently get the default XP search view back up.

c) Try disabling the indexing service? No idea if its likely to help, but I've currently got that disabled on both machines and its inter related to seach perhaps?

[Agent]

use startup CPL and see if there is any dubious files on startup.