Computer Driving Me Crazy

Remember...
Between saying and doing…
Maybe a pair of shoes is worn out.
Italian Proverb

Usually it's someone else's computer that I'm fixing, but today I've spent nearly all day trying to sort out the problems with my own. It's driving me crazy!

The icons on my desktop start flickering crazily, but if I click on the taskbar they settle down. If I give the three-finger-salute, the Task Manager goes all crazy on me, with Isass.exe and taskmgr.exe alternately using 100% of memory. The network usage is up around 530 MB though the other computers aren't on.

I have a horrible feeling that my computer has been hijacked, but all the scans come back clean. I found a few suspicious looking OCX files in windows and system32 folders and deleted them, then noticed that after I deleted the win.tmp and system.tmp files, they were back. I've tried deleting them a few times and they keep coming back. Restarting in Safe Mode made no difference at all. Flickering desktop, strange behaviour in the Windows Explorer screen and the Task Manager. As a last resort I installed a Ghost backup from back in April, but still the problems persist. Then I had the added annoyance of going through the changes in XP that I'd made since then. Like installing Thunderbird in preference to IncrediMail, and FileZilla instead of WSFTP. I've had a shocker of a day, and nothing is resolved, though at the moment there seems to be a reprieve from all the problems.

I've searched the internet for similar problems but to no avail. Most flickering icon problems refer to the refresh rate of the monitor. I'm sure that's not the problem. Spyware no doubt. The bastards are getting trickier by the day. I wish there was some way to divert their nasty activity to something that's useful. On the website we could trick them into clicking on the advertising links instead of the comment and trackback buttons, and actually make money from them. Now if someone could come up with a trick like that I'd love to hear about it.

Although the thought of sticking it to them puts a smile on my dial, it doesn't fix my immediate problems. Nothing is obvious but something is definately off.