Hi everyone, this is my first visit here. I've been searching on-line for possible solutions to my problem, but haven't found anything, but I did run across this forum, and thought I'd throw out my problem and see if anyone has any ideas.

I have three basic problems which I'll state right away, and then get into the details and history.

1. Windows having a hard time starting up. Sometimes it freezes, sometimes it works. Safe mode works sometimes, sometimes it doesn't.

2. After computer has been running for a few hours, it starts getting really, really slow. Task manager does not show any resource hogs. And CPU usage stays low.

3. After mucking around with things, my computer will now only start up in 4 or 8 color mode with no networking. It looks like Safe Mode, but it doesn't say "Safe Mode" like it does when I start in Safe Mode.

I have an HP Pavilion computer with Windows XP (Home edition.) I don't have the specific details with me since I'm at work right now rather than at home. It's a little over two years old. It's been running perfectly fine until about three weeks ago.

Three weeks ago our home flooded. We were out of town and the water came in several inches deep. Our computer was near the floor in a desk cabinet an inch or so above the ground. It was off when the flood occured. When we got home we couldn't see any evidence of water actually touching the computer. It did, however fry a couple components that were on the ground behind it including a router and a TV converter box.

When we reset the computer up, everything looked fine. Note that because our router was fried, I was now connected without a firewall. And I did not have any anti-virus software running.

A day or two later, when we woke up we found our computer had restarted over night and there was some error message that was being displayed saying that Windows could not start because some dll was missing. I apologize for not writing it down. I would have if after restarting again the same error showed up.

It started up like normal afterwards, and although I was a bit wary, I wrote it off as a fluke. The next day or two we started noticing that after the computer would run for four or five hours, it would start getting incredibly slow. To the point that we would have to wait four or five minutes to focus a window or between switching users. It got so bad, we couldn't even shut down because it took too long to bring up start menu.

Usually when my computer is running slowly, I bring up the program manager to see if something is taxing the CPU like a runaway process. But at it's slowest, the CPU still regularly registered as being between 0 and 10%.

I managed to download a trial version of Norton's anti-virus and ran it along with AdAware and another spyware eliminator program. I removed any spyware and some stuff that Norton found, and it seemed like things cleared up and got back to normal.

Two weeks later, things start acting up again. The computer starts running abnormally slowly after several hours. I run another check through everything, but don't find anything. My trail version of Norton expired so I removed it. It told me I had to restart to finish, so I did. For the next four hours I couldn't get my computer to start up again. It kept hanging during various parts of startup whether I was trying to run in Safe Mode or not.

Eventually I chose the option to start up using the last successful settings. When I did, it ultimately worked, but started me up in a low color, low resolution, no networking mode. Just like Safe Mode, except it didn't say Safe Mode.

I tried restarting again and it came up to that same mode. I tried starting in Safe Mode with networking, and it actually came up in a higher color depth. But when I restarted again I was back to the low color, no networking mode again.

So does this sound like the work of a virus, bad hardware, or faulty user? Can anyone tell me how to reset my computer out of this pseudo-Safe Mode and back to running in a higher resolution and the ability to access the Internet?

Thanks in advance for any help or observations you may have.

You sound like your having some very serious problems there. The DLL file error that you mentioned sounds like you've got a missing Windows System File which is probably causing all of your problems. I had this problem once, I got the DLL file error message with a Windows 95 machine and I couldn't get the Desktop to even load. I solved it by formatting and reinstalling Windows.

Can I just say that downloading Norton Antivirus will slow down your computer even more, its a resource hog. So, we need to make a start somewhere. Could you start off by posting a Hijack This Log to the forum so that I can check that you haven't got any nasties on there. Click the link in my signature to see how.