Ok well yesterday I was just surfing the net and somewhere along the way my AV caught something. I immediately denied/deleted the suspicious file and closed the page. I used the computer for the rest of the day/night and it was fine... I left it on over night and it did my usual ad/malware and anti-virus scans. I got up today and the computer still seemed ok. My AV had started through the night but it seems there was a suspicious file running and asked if I wanted to close it, thus not going any further with the scan until I clicked 'Yes' when I got up today. My adware only picked up the usual few 'low risk cookies'. At this point I should have let the AV finish but I chose to stop it while I was doing a job search because it was slowing me down. I noticed things still seemed to be loading unusually slow on the internet so I restarted my PC. (I don't restart very often). I got to the user selection screen (I'm running VISTA 32bit), chose my profile... And when Windows usually starts, only a black screen with 'My Documents' folder (which never used to open on start-up at all) opened.. There is absolutely nothing else on the screen but this folder. I tried restarting again and using my 'Guest' user and it doesn't load, just sends me back to user profile screen. When I boot in safe Mode, my profile does the same... just the Documents folder, and I get this message when I try to load Guest. "Windows could not connect to the sens service. Please contact your system administrator."

I have my Acer recovery cd's, that's it. I'd rather not have to wipe everything, but its looking that way.
What can I do/try? Any ideas? Any help greatly appreciated!

This post has been edited by tyler2112: Mar 8 2010, 09:39 AM

Is there a utility partition on the hard drive? Alot of prebuilt computers have one that you can use to run utilities.

Also, do you only have one profile on the computer(not counting guest, it is probably disabled)? You should have an Administrator profile that you may be able to log into. When you tried Safe Mode did you try your profile?

Do you know anyone with a Vista disk?

My hard drive is basically just split in to 2. One where I just keep my own data..music, videos, etc and the other which holds system files and installed programs. I guess I could try accessing through the explorer address bar in the My Documents folder?

I only have my personal profile (which I'm pretty sure I have set up with administrator rights) and the Guest. And yeah, my personal profile in Safe Mode is still just the blank screen with My Documents folder.

PS: I edited my first post since you last read probably, addressing an error msg and recovery cd's.

Ok, an update. When I'm on the blank screen with the documents folder I can CTRL-ALT-DEL and task manager shows that Windows Explorer is running... but like I said, the screen is blank. I can go to New Task and type in Explorer and everything pops up and seems to run normal. I read of other people having this problem in Vista and it didn't seem virus related. Maybe the virus/suspicous file warning I got were coincidence? Or I deleted something I shouldn't have, although I'm not one to do that. Either way, I'm not sure what i should do to fix this so I don't have to manually start Explorer as a nwe task.

You will need to fix your explorer.exe in your registry most likely. You can Google how to do it, I would explain but I am at work right now.

Uh it looks like I screwed it even more. I got Explorer going like I said above so I decided to just try a System Restore first. bad idea apparently. I put it back to the suggested point which was a few days ago when an update was supposedly installed. After the restore when PC was restarting, it wouldn't even reach the User Profile screen, just hang on a blank one after the Vista loading bar. Now I went and just used my recovery cd's which reinstalls everything on C: and after it cleans it, reinstalls and tries to load Windows to finish the installation I would get either an error saying the "computer restarted unexpectantly, restart to finish installation" or get one of a few different BSOD right as the profile screen is supposed to come up. This just became a cycle of restart/error/BSOD/restart. I tried the recovery cd's one more time just for kicks and I don't seem to get the blue screens anymore, but I still get the same error when it tries to load Windows to finish the recovery?? Btw, a couple of the BSOD I WAS getting were 'Bad Pool Caller' and 'ClassPnP.sys'. Not sure of the code... Anyway, they seem to be gone now...

EDIT: Ok so I had a hunch and tried the recovery AGAIN after I dug out my 2 old sticks of ram that had originally came with my PC. And finally I could boot windows. After everything was set up I put my newer, faster ram back in but i can only get Windows to boot in Safe Mode now or I get a few different BSOD. I remember when I first got the ram about a year ago and installed it I got the same blue screens a couple of times in a row then it worked itself out on its own and was ok ever since... Not the case this time, it just doesn't want to work other than safe mode. I'm doing all the windows and drivers updates I can at the moment.

Just seems like a never-ending string of problems...

This post has been edited by tyler2112: Mar 8 2010, 04:20 PM