My system at home WinXP Pro has been messing up pretty bad over the last couple of days. Very slooowww! All my restore points have been wiped out, and going to safe mode and back has not helped. My virus scanner is up to date and reports no infections. All spyware appears to be removed. Does anyone know of any tools I can use to help figure out the problem, so I don't have to wipe the drives and start over again? PLEASE Let me know soon!
Thanks

What spyware / antivirus are you using? Some of the latest spyware infections are extremely nasty and hard to clean.

I have used Spybot and Ad-Aware. Spybot keeps locking up. I use Mcafee Virus (Enterprise) and all def's are current and up to date. I started the new MS Spyware tool before I came to work. Don't know what that will reveil or trash...

If you're sure there is no spyware, FixIt from Ontrack software is not bad.

On the other hand if you are technically minded I'd recommend just going for the full rebuild - gets rid of all that MS Cruft too.

I know people put their faith in programs like McAfee, but having done a little freelance tech support and been to dozens of people's homes, I have very little faith in them, and tend to believe that they do more harm than good.

If you can manage it despite the slowness, I'd seriously recommend temporarily uninstalling McAfee, loading AVG Antivirus, and seeing if you notice an improvement. There were several instances I've seen that McAfee uses so many system resources that it makes the computer unusable. When weighed against your average virus, I actually find that more damaging!

And I must post this once and for all. Like I said, I've been to dozens of people's homes to work on their computers. Once I got a job I stopped. However, from that experience I noticed an interesting thing. There hasn't been a computer yet on which I haven't found at least one virus with AVG where Norton or McAfee said there was none. Half of these instances resulted in some semi-nasty viruses. Now, this isn't to say it can't work the other way around, but I think that when all the pros and cons are weighed, AVG has far more going for it.