[Molecule]

I must have clicked in something from somewhere ... from slowness of modem and from lag in keyboard, it was obvious I had a spyware or DOS virus or something, but I can't seem to get rid of it ... (spybot latest and avg latest don't pick it up) ... so to circumvent it on my own, I shutdown, booted to a 144-dos and did a scanreg /restore to ring in an old registry. Runtime and keyboard response and display of desktop icons were almost back to normal, but now, when I try to shutdown, my box just reboots itself perpetually ... shutdown == auto-reboot again. I have to pull the plug in the middle of the bios post routine to shutdown.

Anyone have an idea how I might search my registry to find the command that is rerouting my shutdown? (Or, if this isn't the right forum, please advise...)

[eidenk]

Your symptoms are described here : http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;en-us;238096

[Molecule]

Awesome - thanks eidenk! Problem solved ... turned off the fast shutdown key in registry.

The threads seemed to suggest a hardware conflict, and so at first that frightened me. I thought maybe my mobo bios was not IDing a 120G swappable hdd I just added, or that maybe the scsi bios (adaptec 2940 for zip100 when booting from it, scsi cds controlled from w98se) had a memory conflict with something deep like that ( ... I gave up playing around with trying to install w98 with 98lite (v47pro) on a zip ... I had somehow done it long ago, just by pure clueless hacking and hacking ... but now I can't remember how I did it - and naturally, I had left the scsi bios loading but with no disk in drive) or that I had forgotten to turn off native version of scandisk during a w98 setup, since I have large drives in the system, or that I had used dos16 file utilities on lfn vfats, all of which were things that I had done recently, which MS apparently identified can cause this problem ?? -- so I was getting pretty scared there ... but it turns out the registry key fixed the *symptom just fine ... now let's hope everything else works.

Any chance you might know if the rundll32 link in my registry "Run" folder looks fishy?

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
"TaskMonitor"="C:\\WINDOWS\\taskmon.exe"
"SystemTray"="SysTray.Exe"
"Microsoft IntelliType Pro"="\"C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Hardware\\Keyboard\\speedkey.exe\""
"Adaptec DirectCD"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\ADAPTEC\\DIRECTCD\\DIRECTCD.EXE"
"TotalRecorderScheduler"="\"C:\\Program Files\\HighCriteria\\TotalRecorder\\TotRecSched.exe\""
"LoadPowerProfile"="Rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,LoadCurrentPwrScheme"
"ScanRegistry"="C:\\WINDOWS\\scanregw.exe /autorun"
"WRBICON"="C:\\Program Files\\Datapol\\WinRollBack\\WRBIcon.EXE"
"AVG7_CC"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\GRISOFT\\AVGFRE~1\\AVGCC.EXE /STARTUP"
"AVG7_AMSVR"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\GRISOFT\\AVGFRE~1\\AVGAMSVR.EXE"
"AVG7_EMC"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\GRISOFT\\AVGFRE~1\\AVGEMC.EXE"

;c:\windows\system\
;POWER.DRV 1,920 04/23/1999
;POWERCFG.CPL 51,984 04/26/1999
;POWEROLD.DLL 57,344 04/26/1999
;POWRPROF.DLL 24,576 04/26/1999 <-does this one look right: it uses rundll32?

[eidenk]

This key is allright. It does exist on a fresh OS install.

For your keyboard laging, if it still does. It must be IntelliType the culprit.