Applications fail to start

[Astray]

This happened on a couple of workstations in our office and I'm not too sure hwo to fix it, other than reformatting.

Shortly after I installed Microsoft Office SP1a and SP3 (sp2 is included with sp3), programs will fail to start after a certain amount of time. Sometimes it happens after about an hour or so of the computer being turned on, and gradually starts to happen more and more frequently, such as about 5 minutes after the computer is initially turned on.

All programs fail to start, even things such as the task manager will not start. You also cannot shut down. You can however still work programs perfectly fine that are allready opened.

I've tried uninstalling the service packs and even Microsoft Office all together, but the problem persists.

Does anyone know what's going on here, or possibly a fix? I've tried searching microsofts website but am unable to find anything useful.

Edited August 30, 2006 by Astray

[nitroshift]

First off: scan your machines for viruses / malware / spyware.

Second: scan your machines for viruses / malware / spyware.

[Code-E]

One of my relatives had the same thing. What I did to fix it was go into the internet options and clear the cookies and everything else.If that doesn't work scan for some malware/grayware.If that still doesn't work then you may have to reformat.

[Astray]

First off: scan your machines for viruses / malware / spyware.

Second: scan your machines for viruses / malware / spyware.

We've tried this many times, spyware checks found nothing, same with the antivirus. I even went through symantics virus records to look for these symptoms but wasn't able to find any virus's that would cause this.

[DigeratiPrime]

what antivirus and malware cleaner programs are you using?

[Jeremy]

Are you running low on actual disk space? Are you sure your harddrive is physically/mechanically healthy?

With it happening constantly and with multiple programs, I think the best thing to do would be to backup your personal/important files and reformat/reinstall.

[Astray]

Are you running low on actual disk space? Are you sure your harddrive is physically/mechanically healthy?

With it happening constantly and with multiple programs, I think the best thing to do would be to backup your personal/important files and reformat/reinstall.

This isn't a very good option considering it does it on almost all of our machines, though some show the symptoms a little slower than others. Though we could reformat, I'd rather find a fix for it before I go through the labor intensive reformatting on over 10 machines.

[Jeremy]

If the machines are all the same hardware, you could reformat one machine, install, configure, then image the drive and image the rest of the machines.

As for finding a fix, have you tried just reinstalling XP as opposed to reformatting?

Quite honestly, after reading your first post again, I feel it may be hardware related. You should test your RAM with Memtest (Ultimate BootCD v3.4 is a great choice), not only to see if that is the problem, but also just for the sake of knowing you have good RAM. UBCD also contains all the harddrive diagnostic tools so you could test your drive as well.

Edited September 1, 2006 by Jeremy