Remote Assistance Problem

[simonjackson79]

Hi,

A friend has had a huge problem with his pc when he has requested remote assistance from me via MSN messenger. Once it connects, the speed of both pc's decreases quite dramatically. Now this might sound reasonably normal, however a quick restart once disconnected and my pc runs normally but my friends pc continues to run at a snails pace and almost every program locks up(even simple ones like Notepad). Last time this happened I had to go round and do a complete re-install of windows xp. Can anyone shed any light on this situation?

Just for information:
My PC is a 350Mhz K62(low spec I know, although it is overclocked significantly), 256 Mb Ram. Running XP Pro, with Norton Firewall and Anti-Virus(virus definitions are up to date).

Friends PC is a Athlon 2400, 512Mb Ram. Running XP Pro, with Norton Firewall and McAfee VirusShield(definitions up to date).

I'm wondering whether it could be a problem with svchost.exe as ending one of the four instances of this in Task Manager solves the problem temporarily. Has anyone else had this problem and if so, is there a solution to it other than a complete rebuild of the pc?

Many thanks in advance,

Simon

 

[1101001100110101]

Could be a virus I belave the Welchia worm and
MSBLAST.D worm both make a fake svchost.exe that runs on startup. Try doing the free online scan from trend micro see if it detects anything. If it is one of those they could have disabled you Macafee

 

[jeremybarker]

svchost.exe runs many services. open a command prompt and type "tasklist /svc" This will list what processes are running under each svchost, if you are able to kill off a particular one in task manager, compare with the one listed in the command prompt. IE: if it's the 3rd svchost.exe in taskmanager, it'll be the 3rd listed in the command prompt. Once you have run tasklist /svc, copy and paste the output here.
HTH