My brother has Windows XP Home edition on his computer. All of a sudden, about 10min. ago, he began having folders open up on his computer. They were random folders like his music folder and game folders. When he clicks the X, they minimize to the taskbar. When he right clicks on them while in the taskbar, you don't get the regular options you do for a folder. You get file options, like open, delete, etc. Deleting will actually get rid of the folder but it'll be replaced my a new random folder. When he brings up the Task Manager, they don't appear there. I haven't investigated and looked at his processes yet. I'm about to go out to dinner, so I figured I'd post here real quick. He did a quick search on google and found one person with the same problem but the person never got a response in the forum where they posted.
Like I said, I haven't done any investigating myself. He just showed me real quick. Hopefully someone has seen something similar.
This is either a virus/trojan or adwarez. More likely the virus. I'm assuming you have anti-virus protection? Is it up to date? Probably not because you contracted one.
He already had McAfee and ran it (with up-to-date virus definitions) and nothing was found. He ran his spyware removal program and it removed three things, but nothing that really caught his eye (since I'm sure we're all familiar by now with most spyware programs, like gator).
However, he did find a solution on another forums. He unchecked the "Lock tool bar" option on his task bar. He then unchecked a Toolbar that was set. Of course, when he tried to show me which one it was, he couldn't remember and couldn't find it again (as it wasn't a default). After unchecking it, everything was fine.
It still seems a bit weird to me. It should be like you all said some kind of foreign program on his comp (virus, spyware, etc.). That's exactly what I thought it was, but wasn't really sure since I knew he had all the programs to protect against it. I know stuff still slips by, but I wanted to be sure someone hadn't encountered this before. Apparently someone did on another forum. So it works now.
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