Taskbar turns yellow, then crash

[fendel]

I did a motherboard transplant on my friend's eMachines recently. It seems it was running OK initially but now is experiencing random reboots. She says that before it reboots, the taskbar turns yellow and displays with "ERR" in a box. Has anyone ever heard of this?

I was thinking overheating might be the problem (I thought I applied the AS and heatsink properly, but who knows) -- but it doesn't quite add up. She says it doesn't happen when the computer is idle. She had it on for three hours while she watched TV and it was fine (although I think I may have tinkered with her power settings so that drives etc would shut off after a while, so that could explain that). But another time it crashed when the only thing she was running was Minesweeper, which is not exactly a heavy CPU load...

Explorer crashed when she tried to copy files to a CD-R.

In addition to rebuilding her computer, I took a ton of spyware off it. A lot of files got wiped out. Is there any way that accidentally deleting the wrong .dll file could cause symptoms like this?

I'm supposed to go over and fix this thing in 4 1/2 hours.

 

[stevty2889]

When you swapped motherboards, did you re-install windows, or at least do a repair install? If not, thats probably the problem..

 

[amdskip]

Originally posted by: stevty2889
When you swapped motherboards, did you re-install windows, or at least do a repair install? If not, thats probably the problem..

Yeah, is this windows xp?

 

[fendel]

This is Windows XP... but I replaced the motherboard with the exact same make and model because I didn't want to deal with the reactivation hassles.

I never did see the yellow-taskbar thing, although a couple of times Windows crashed and the taskbar disappeared, and she said that's what happened before. More to the point, when I was running some virus and spyware scans, lo and behold Internet Explorer windows kept popping up out of nowhere. She had an adware infestation that I think was actually left over from when I cleaned up her machine a couple of weeks ago -- there was a suspicious DLL showing in Hijack This, but the description looked sort of authentic and Windows-related, and it kept coming back after I deleted it, so I let it slide; dumb move. It apparently spawned some more Look2Me files, and somehow she managed to get a trojan on there too, and oh what a mess.

I'm assuming the assorted malware caused the system instability. I think I got it cleaned up. I ran Spyware Blaster and IE-SPYAD last time, so now that Look2Me is finally eradicated, hopefully she won't pick up any more malware. So -- mystery solved (for now, at least).