hi

i'd appreciate advice on recent and very strange changes on my machine. they seem pretty simple, but i'm worried there's something more serious going on.

my task manager doesn't have a tool bar/menu bar! i don't know why or how…but it doesn't anymore. i just get the info windows, ctrl-tab through those, and alt-f4 to close it.

my command prompt seems seriously broken. the Run program on the task bar works to run executables, but try putting in regedit and it opens and shuts down with no error reported. i did manage to get it open once, and tried pinging machines on the LAN (was looking for IP addresses) and i get a stream of ASCII back and it seems to hang briefly before returning to the prompt.

i have a new dvd drive! don't know where that came from… was using daemon tools a couple weeks back but it's not running and all drives were unmounted.

I have just suffered a serious malware attack, but i think these problems are unrelated.

in my device manager, there is a Plug and Play BIOS Extension that has been flagged. the driver is corrupt or missing, apparently. I don't know what this device is, or why it's there, or where the driver was installed from…i don't use any plug & play hardware except my monitor. Reckon it'd be safe to remove it?

have something called SP2 connection patcher which constantly moves itself into my start menu…what is it??

i am in the process of a) trying to eradicate the malware & b) try to clean up this machine of useless software etc. so that I can c) set a decent system restore point. the current restore point is just too old; i'd lose too much if i reset.

alright,
thanks for any help you can offer.


Windows XP Pro Sp2
KMD Athlon 2800+ 64bit
Gigabyte K8NS Pro
Winfast A340 Ultra T/NVidia GEForce 5200 Ultra
ESI Waveterminal 192M