a strange event occurred the other night:
i was surfing the net and, simultaneously, clearing some un needed programs from my hard drive. i selected a demo of an old game (Soldier of Fortune) for deletion through the start menu and immediately afterwards i received a “.dll exception” message and explorer had to kill itself, forcing a restart. i do not recall the exact dll file, as i sort of freaked out and later couldnt recall the exact error code. i do not think that my attempt to delete the game file caused this, i think it was coincidental, but what could have caused it? after restarting, all of my hardware devices were apparently uninstalled. every piece of hardware i own was popping up as “new hardware detected”. my graphics settings were reset to default. my USB devices no longer functioned until after the system had scanned all other hardware and finally detected the USB ports. everything is basically functional at this point, but the system is running much slower for basic operations now. i de-fragged, virus-scanned, and spyware scanned to no avail. i continue to have slow speeds for basic functions (like opening/closing windows and basic programs, taking forever to begin a basic download, and the computer makes a noisier clicking sound when the hard drive is processing something) and, also, i now occasionally have lag between the audio and video tracks when i watch videos, including on youtube. my system specs are as follows:
PIII 3.0 GHz
512 MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM
160 GB hard drive
NVdia GeForce 7800 GS
Windows XP Home Edition
any help would be appreciated. thanks for your time!
