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General discussion

Norton scanning like crazy

by Hyperspace Jan 8, 2006 10:52AM PST

Tonight, when I turned on my PC, I noticed the hard drive light has been blinking non-stop and Norton keeps popping up with these little windows advising me that it is waiting for a scan of a file.
The file names I have seen thus far are:

msnetmtg
1394bus.sys
msncli.exe
mscpxl32
mscpx32r
msnmsgs
pchshell.dll
fp40ext.cab

(for some of them, I didn't catch the file extension)

Afer awhile, a window also popped up stating, "Windows - Virtual Memory Minimum Too Low".

I have Windows XP Home Edition, 1.3 GHz processor, 384 MB DDR.

Now, as I type this, Windows Update just popped up telling me I have 1 update ready to install and the hard drive light has finally turned off.
I use Norton Internet Security and AdAware SE. The Norton icon in the system tray has now disappeared although Norton seems to still be running.

Can someone shed some light on this, please? I hope I don't suddenly have some malware.

Discussion is locked

8 Posts
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Do you have Windows Updates
by roddy32 Jan 8, 2006 12:47PM PST

set to download and install automatically? Do you have SP2? Did you check and see what update it is trying to install? That MAY be all it is because the files that I checked (not all of them though) are Microsoft files. I do NOT do automatic updates so I can't tell you how to check so see what this is but I would think there has to be a way to do that. What do you do normally when you do Windows Updates?

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Update...
by Hyperspace Jan 8, 2006 1:11PM PST

I have Windows Update set to notify me but not download automatically.
Since I last posted, I have installed SP2. The odd thing here is that I had originally clicked on the SP2 update the second-last time I had my computer on but all that happened was that the notification disappeared from the checklist of available updates. Nothing happened the very last time I had my computer on either. I turned my PC on today and you know what happened as listed in my last post.


Just as an aside, I notice that my computer takes longer to boot up now and SP2 added about 5000 files to my hard drive. Should I have SP2 or is it more trouble than it's worth?

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SP2 adds a lot of security to the
by roddy32 Jan 8, 2006 8:26PM PST

computer. You should have installed it over a year ago actually. The slow booting may improve as time goes on, mine did the same thing for the first few days if I remember correctly, (it was a long time ago) but eventually it was faster than it was originally. Is everything working OK now? Occasionally there are growing pains with SP2 but it is well worth the security.

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Seems okay...
by Hyperspace Jan 9, 2006 3:50AM PST

I guess the problem I had (in my original post in this thread) was SP2 downloading or something. I just wonder why it didn't do this until the second day after I clicked for it to download. That seems strange to me.

Everything seems okay to this point. The reason I delayed updating to SP2 was because of all the horror stories I heard about it. My system seems to be running smoothly now but, as I said, takes longer to boot up.
Do you think extra memory would solve this issue? I currently have 384 MB of DDR.

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It wouldn't hurt but I don't know how
by roddy32 Jan 9, 2006 4:04AM PST

much it would help either. I have supposedly 512 but in reality it is 448 but this computer boots up fast. Give it some time, I have no idea why but mine got faster as time went on after installing SP2.

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Thanks
by Hyperspace Jan 9, 2006 6:59AM PST

I'm still puzzled about Windows starting to download SP2 two days after I clicked on it in Update Center but I guess that's what this whole situation was. Must not have been malware of any kind.

Thanks for the assistance.

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It probably took that long to download, it's
by roddy32 Jan 9, 2006 7:15AM PST

almost 300MB. I'm on dialup so I used the free CD from Microsoft when I did it in September of 2004. You are welcome.

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512 - 64MB shared memory = 448MB of free RAM
by caktus Jan 9, 2006 2:03PM PST

Ran into these notes a while back. A while after incresasing the Page file size the system sped up a bit.
Guide to Video Cards


Increased the PF size to 4GB. Probably doesn't need that much. Also, regularly Defraging the PF helps a bit.

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