Windows XP freaked the #*$& out of me!

Running XP, it has a good uptime so far this week... try to run a ping... then a tracert... and anything else... all returns with file not found. Quick spyware and antivirus scan turned up nothing... so thankfully there isn't anything majorly wrong, right?

Ok... time to reboot... now I have that my firewall and antivirus cannot be detected by Windows... even though they are working. The WMI service has a problem (according to my logs located in System Management)... and apparently I can't do any command line tools to verify anything... they don't seem to exist.

So, system restore to yesterday... christmas... no dice... same problem. Undo the restoration... I can't boot into Windows anymore!!

Now into Safe Mode... ok, start from the basics... I can log in here and I have a working laptop with XP. The laptop is XP Home... my desktop is XP Pro... but they should be similar. I looked at my path variables under the advanced tab in system properities on my crippled desktop and the laptop.

On the laptop it would list such things as c:\Windows\system32
On the desktop it would list such things as %windir%\system32
The desktop being as well as I can remember though...

Ok... well... I made the desktop path properities exactly the same as the laptop in that I replaced all %windir% with c:\Windows. Note that the windir variable was set correctly on both the laptop and desktop... but I had no idea what else to try. Low and behold... I have ping back... little consolation being that I cannot boot Windows in normal mode... and I have the Security Center to worry about.

This computer was working fine a couple of days ago!!

Reboot... and low and behold NOTHING IS WRONG NOW! What the heck happened!?!

So, my question to the forum is... other than virus and spyware scanning the living heck out of this machine... is there anything else I should do? Normal Windows machines don't randomly decide to go crazy just to keep me entertained after all...

It should be noted that I was playing with Tribes 2 recently, trying to get it to work. It is an older game, doesn't support XP directly (it only goes up to 2000), it didn't get online... and it didn't uninstall properly... not that it concerned me at the tope. I was messing with that yesterday.

Hmm...wierd...have you checked your router for any wierd incoming connections? What firewall/are u are u running?

I'm running Zone Alarm (never found anything better) and my router is neutralized... since I am in a campus environment and I *cough*shouldn't even have it*cough*. The campus has a firewall seperating, to a degree, me from the internet and most people are home for christmas break (I have a campus apartment so I can stay here while the dorm folks have to go home).

I have Avast as my antivirus program and Lavasoft Adaware for the spyware protection bit. Also, I use Firefox as my browser... which is somewhat helpful at least.

Do you have an HP printer installed?

Actually... yes I do. It is a variant, but uses the same drivers (Apollo 1200... something like that). Ironically enough, the replacement for that printer (not insalled yet) is another HP printer.

What does having a HP printer have to do with this issue? Only reason I ask is that a few of my systems had been acting wonky a few days ago (but not to the extreme gt24 experienced), and I do have an HP printer on the network (among others), but is not used very often. Thanks.

I determined that the computers here at work have a similar path variable as what I have seen before... and thought was causing issues at home... but it apparently works here.

We use HP printers here as well.

PATH
%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\system32\WBEM;C:\Program Files\QuickTime\QTSystem\;C:\Program Files\Support Tools\

Maybe something happened that made all of the % variables no longer function properly on my home machine... if so, then I would like to resolve that issue eventually... since it cannot be a good thing overall...