Need Ideas

Well my friend says that he downloaded a program to burn dvd's on a cd-rw. I though ok fine not really thinking that he didn't know places to get this that are secure. He's all braggin about it b/c I dont' have a cd-rw and yada yada. So I'm talkin to him a skoo today and he says that his computer is fudged up. I ask what it'll do and what it doesn't. He said it boots and such fine. All the original icons like explorer, my computer, documents, ect... come up but when he'll click something like explorer or msn messenger to use them it gives a "illegal..." He wasn't real specific there so I dunno what exactly is wrong I havn't gotten to fiddle with it yet. It'll be a lil bit til I can get over there and tinker with it. It has to be the program for burning dvd's b/c he said he hadn't done ne thing but that. It's prolly just some dumb virus. He claimed he had norton on there but I doubt he keeps it upto date. I'm prolly gonna need a few suggestions on what todo. Any imput appretiated.

Virus is a very real possibility. Try going to security.norton.com or housecall.antivirus.com and running an online virus scan. That's assuming you can get it to work, of course. There are viruses that will screw up everything so that you get errors whenever you try to run any program.

You don't mention what OS he's running, but you could try uninstalling that burning program and then doing a system restore if that option is available to you.

Failing that or if you can't get any programs at all to run, try the uninstall/restore through safe mode. If still nothing, your friend has probably bought himself an os reinstall.

I'm pretty sure he's using 98. I'll have to see what happens.