More computer problems

[Buick From Hell]

I've been bombed by viruses lately, and I think some backdoor trojan viruses have fubar'd my home desktop again...No more not running a firewall for me!

I'm running Win 2000 pro...Has anyone heard of a background 'process' program called "tjspec.exe"??? I've never noticed it before, and it's been running the last few days, and whenever I try to get online, this program hogs all the CPU time & resourses, to the point that the computer is useless. It can't be stopped or the 'priority' changed. And this program CANNOT BE FOUND ON MY COMPUTER!! The only place it shows up in a search AT ALL in the bootlog notepad and registry info (just shows it's a running process)...is it possible this is caused by a secondary data stream, generated by a virus? (my son's possible theory)... BTW, after installing the firewall, this program tries to access the internet. I tell it "no", after which it then hogs all CPU time and then everything else slows down to a crawl.

Right now I'm on the laptop (24k sucks) just to post this!

Another problem is it seems my HP printer driver software is getting corrupted, the driver programs in the background act like the 'tjspec' program, hogs all the CPU time. However, I CAN stop those programs.

We completely cleaned off the harddrive & started fresh less than 6 weeks ago. It's only a 17 gig drive, and we partitioned it to a 7 gig C drive & 10 gig D drive, JUST IN CASE this crap happened. There's very little on the C drive except Win2000, so we moved everything else to the D drive & attempted to re-format the C drive and re-install Win2000. But when setup gets to the partition information, we get an "unknown" partition...so much for the easy fix

Scandisk, chkdsk and everything else finds no errors...?

Can viruses cause all this crap?? Or do I have a computer from hell??

And if everything goes as usual, it'll only take me 2 days to do the re-install...

tjspec.exe---anyone know what it is?? TIA!

 

[striker_29]

Never heard of it

I would run spybot, see if that helps. Do that and check back in.

http://download.com.com/3000-2144-10194058.html?tag=lst-0-1

 

[tjthorson]

Kevin - you need to think about moving to Illinois. If you were closer we could clean this stuff up permanently.

Never heard of tjspec and a search on the internet gives me nothing, so I suspect its spyware or some proprietary software you installed that is not cooperating with 2000.

If you reload this thing again, you better go XP this time. Quit messing with 2000.

Click start/run and type msconfig.

select "Selective startup" and go to the startup tab.

UNCLICK everything you do NOT recognize. You really can't break anything important here. Only disable some of your programs TSRs (system tray stuff)

A word for the future. If you do reload this machine, get it all setup how you like it and make an image of it. Then - if you blow it up in the future, it takes 20 minutes to reload the whole box instead of 2 days.... I can talk you through this if you get this one cleaned up enough and want to image it.

 

[Buick From Hell]

thanks as usual guys!

Well, I'm all up & running -- again! No tjspec now either! I just loaded Norton using my sons disk instead of mine, and it has "ghost" on it, will that work to create my image? (never used it) I've been using Go-Back, but when I noticed I definitely had a problem, the farthest back revert date was only like 4 days, which wasn't enough to do me any good!

I got the firewall up, most of my files loaded back up, and it's working fine--for now!

 

[striker_29]

Yes Ghost is exactly what you want to use for creating your image. Let me know if you need some help doing it.

 

[afresh]

Hey Kev,

If you need any help let me know. Shoot me an email or give me a call. I'd be willing to take a look at any computer issues.

Andrew