windows explorer crashing, weird processes' virus?

[Soma]

I'm running Xp sp2, and recently when I've started hitting "Shutdown" all my icons on the desktop will disappear then reappear and windows explorer will crash and it'll ask to send error report and blah blah. but I'll still have to hit shutdown again for it to go off, and then sometimes a message will pop up saying " some program is not responding click here to end now or lose data" or whatever, but the program doesn't have a name i think it's shown as all asteriks or *'s or some weird ascii symbols. I

I've checked my running processes and it's not in there. I've also been trying to modify my starting programs under Run/msconfig and whenever i hit Apply it says i should log onto an admin account, but as far as i know this is the admin account, i've never had more than one windows logon. so is there something i can do to check? like under control panel maybe?

While I'm looking at things, i have like 6 instances of svchost.exe running. and i've heard that if they aren't all stemming from the same windows folder then it's probably a virus. I checked that a long time ago, but any advice on what i should do about that?

I'm thinking i have some weird virus going on. But i'm certainly no expert and any help is greatly appreciated!

EDIT: it says I'm the Admin, i think it does make the changes but it's odd that the error message would still popup.

[Pyrion]

AFAIK, it's not really an "admin" account, it's a "superuser" account, meaning you run with admin-like privileges but there's a hidden administrator account that basically has FULL ACCESS.

Like for instance, full access to the System Volume Information folder, which you don't get even with your admin-lite superuser account.

My advice would be to load up SysInternals Process Explorer, instead of Task Manager. That will actually tell you what those svchosts are handling (if you hover your mouse over them).

[phill]

If you want to check to see what the svchosts are handling without installing a nice gui add on, open up the command line and type in "tasklist /svc" without the quotes. From there you can either look up anything that looks iffy or come back here with the list.

[erik212]

I've had this problem on my old computer. I think it was the result of my computer getting very old. I would end a lot of processes that took up memory, which eventually f-ed my computer up. If you can, reformat your HDD. That fixes anything!! (almost)