I just recently purchased a NEW Compaq computer, it has a athalon 64 processor, and things were going fine with it for about a week. Then I downloaded an exe file that when I opened it, a black window came up that looked like a cmd window then disappeared. I then tried deleting the file, but I kept getting a pop up that said it was in use, but there was no visible applications that I could tell that was using it. Then the computer would crash and show either vertical stripes or a solid color on the screen and I would have to re-boot.A friend helped me go into DOS mode to remove the file and that SEEMED to work. Then we installed a second hard drive and a second disc drive. The only problem that I saw with that was the computer had an error loading the operating system. He then switched it so ithat would boot from the origianl hard drive, and since then, that problem has CEASED. But today it is doing the random crashes with vertical stripes again, and my media player doesn't work. I've run Norton and several anti-spy ware programs, and they all say my system is clean.  If anyone has any idea of what to do NEXT, I would greatly appreciate their help or advice. ThanksI always use http://www.trendmicro.com  Select Online Housecall.  It scans for everything.  Another option is autoruns. http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Autoruns.html That program will show you all sorts of startup info and you can delete unneed programs from loading.Why are you opening unknown files without checking them first? :-?
Boot to Safe Mode and as far as you can, CARRY out the procedures listed [highlight]in this post[/highlight] and post a Hijackthis logfile here when done.