Bigus Dickus
Regular
I've run one malware check program that came back negative, and keep Symantec running at full strength.
Problem - web browsers keep crashing. This has been happening recently with IE6, IE7.3, and the latest FireFox. IE displays three behaviors: (1) crash when opening a web page, either launching from scratch or following a link, by simply disappearing; (2) crashing with an error report notification; or (3) crashing with a runtime 217 error. FireFox exhibits the first two behaviors.
Doesn't seem to be any particular site doing this... it can happen pulling up the Google homepage, it can be fine for a given site all day and crash suddenly, or shut down following a link several times in a row and then the next time seems to work fine.
This is on WindowsXP Professional, SP2 with all the latest updates (actually added several of them after this behavior started to see if that helped). No other software I've run lately has seemed to have any unusual behavior (mostly office applications... one light game, and some CAD software).
As far as I can remember, no significant (or insignificant) software changes were made from before to after this started. However, we did travel with the computer on a 12 hour move (well boxed, factory packing, computer in car not on a truck).
Another possibly related problem is that three or four times now in the past week I've seen a BSOD - the first ever on XP for me (actually, don't recall many if any on Win2000 either). I jotted one of the dump codes down if that helps. I've also found the computer locked a couple of times and had to reboot (usually locked at a login screen after going to sleep).
I have searched for all of the programs running in task manager, and none seem to be sings of a virus, spyware, or other malicious thing.
Does this seem symptomatic of hardware or software? Suggestions? If software, how do I track what is happening when a browser shuts down? If hardware, any suspicions?
Problem - web browsers keep crashing. This has been happening recently with IE6, IE7.3, and the latest FireFox. IE displays three behaviors: (1) crash when opening a web page, either launching from scratch or following a link, by simply disappearing; (2) crashing with an error report notification; or (3) crashing with a runtime 217 error. FireFox exhibits the first two behaviors.
Doesn't seem to be any particular site doing this... it can happen pulling up the Google homepage, it can be fine for a given site all day and crash suddenly, or shut down following a link several times in a row and then the next time seems to work fine.
This is on WindowsXP Professional, SP2 with all the latest updates (actually added several of them after this behavior started to see if that helped). No other software I've run lately has seemed to have any unusual behavior (mostly office applications... one light game, and some CAD software).
As far as I can remember, no significant (or insignificant) software changes were made from before to after this started. However, we did travel with the computer on a 12 hour move (well boxed, factory packing, computer in car not on a truck).
Another possibly related problem is that three or four times now in the past week I've seen a BSOD - the first ever on XP for me (actually, don't recall many if any on Win2000 either). I jotted one of the dump codes down if that helps. I've also found the computer locked a couple of times and had to reboot (usually locked at a login screen after going to sleep).
I have searched for all of the programs running in task manager, and none seem to be sings of a virus, spyware, or other malicious thing.
Does this seem symptomatic of hardware or software? Suggestions? If software, how do I track what is happening when a browser shuts down? If hardware, any suspicions?