2 weeks ago I experinced a problem with my pc where everything starts up fine except the windows xp takes a little longer to open. Then when it opens all I can see is the desktop background. I don't have the money to buy a new OS disc to reboot, but I got another pc from my parents for christmas. It uses the same windows xp that my other pc uses. LAST night my wife was USING the pc and walked away to give our little girl a bath and she came back and the only THING on the screen was the desktop background. I can't even open the task manager. Well I used the recovery disk and it said that I was missing a file from my sys file. I didn't catch the full file name but it was something like agvavi.exe or something to that effect. The other weird thing was that while I was running the recovery process the command prompt window kept popping up on the screen until I turned off the modem. How can I tell if someone has HACKED my system and deleted files for me? And is there anyway I could have transfered a virus from an external hard drive from PC to PC? Also how can I check my files on the command prompt to see what has been deleted? How far did you go with Recovery CD, and what is the CURRENT status of your computer?The recovery process finished, but it still did what i desricbed before. I formated the hard drive and then reloaded and it is fine now, but I don't want to plug it in to the net until I figure out what happend and how to prevent it again.Is this a Windows XP CD with shiny holograms all over it ? ?
Did you remember to re-install all your drivers including MBoard and video ? ?I installed the disc that came with the pc it was not a windows disc but says it has windows xp drivers on it. I have not changed any hardware on the pc so that disc also reinstalled the drivers. The new pc is fine now, but I want to know what I do to prevent the same thing from happening again. At first with my old PC I thought it happend because I kept turning it off with out shutting it off. But then my new pc did it without that problem and it did it while it was running.What exactly does it say on this CD ? ?
The drivers are normally on a seperate CD...depending on the manufacturer.Okay, let me say this again. The PC is operating fine now after i fomated the hard drive and re-installed everything. What I need to know is what happend and how can I prevent it from happening again.From time to time system files and or other files can become corrupted which may have caused this behaviour...
Since it is running fine now it's very possible this may have been the case.

But two things you can do in the MEANTIME:
DLoad and run the diagnostics from the hard drive manuf. site.
This will tell if the drive itself is healthy.

The second thing you can test is the RAM
DLoad and run MemTest...this will make sure the RAM is healthy...

Both of the above will create a bootable CD to run the respective tests.

Other than that if both test out fine you may want to consider a backup strategy.
I use Acronis True Image which creates an image of your entire drive.
The advantage to this is when you restore if things go wrong you don't have to re-install the OS and all your programs...it's all there in one operation, including all your data up to the point the image is created.

Hope this helps...