Bizzare boot.ini problem - Help please!

hooneeawr · 27 Dec 2009 at 17:07

My sister has an Acer Aspire One netbook which runs Windows XP. Recently she has been complaining of slowness and suchlike, so I went on today to tidy it up a bit.

When I restarted I got an error saying that it could not find Hal.dll. This is not a fun message to receive. However this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330184 cleared the problem right up.

Windows now boots fine. However, I noticed while in Windows that there is no boot ini file. Sure enough, when I restarted, up pops the Hal.dll error again!

It appears that something during the startup is corrupting or deleting the boot.ini file. Any ideas what it could be?

I'm away to remove Kaspersky as it's also being a bit weir, but this one has me stumped!

wozencl · 27 Dec 2009 at 18:09

A quick browse of the interweb has brought up a few known culprits

AskUpgradeService*
Internet Explorer 8 (I doubt it's the software itself but something that's being installed and used with it, look out for unusual BHO's.)

*Part of the Ask Toolbar Installed as part of some part of some Peer2Peer programs. Perhaps some versions with more added goodies than usual are doing the rounds? Remove this if found.

Ideally, you should boot into Safe Mode and run some anti-malware and anti-virus programs. Definitely sounds malware related to me.

hooneeawr · 27 Dec 2009 at 21:45

wozencl said:
AskUpgradeService*
Internet Explorer 8 (I doubt it's the software itself but something that's being installed and used with it, look out for unusual BHO's.)

Anti virus and anti malware came up with nothing, however at one point I did remove the Ask toolbar. Coincidence that it started rebooting fine after that?

Seems to be working okay now. Phew, thought my sister was going to kill me when that Hal.dll error was coming up!

wozencl · 28 Dec 2009 at 13:35

Anti virus and anti malware came up with nothing, however at one point I did remove the Ask toolbar. Coincidence that it started rebooting fine after that?

Seems to be a combination of Ask Toolbar and IE8 or XP SP3, it's definitely a bug in the Ask Update Service. It also corrupts files in Document and Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer.

More evidence that toolbars should be avoided like a particulary horrible STD.