Recently, my 350 MHz AMD K-6 3D Now 2 computer using Win 98 SE has been
acting very slow – the mouse hesitates and it takes a few moments to load
programs. I have an older computer with 256 RAM and a relatively new (less
than a year) Maxtor 40 Gb hard drive (using only 8 Gb) and under System, I
have 90% free resources. I ran Spybot – no issues, McAfee – no issues and
then Ad-Aware. It stopped under a file named Viewpoint and would not
continue. I looked under Program Files/Viewpoint and found some garbled
files (|@$advjnv) totaling over 92 Gb and dates ranging from 1943 to 1984. I
attempted to delete them but was not successful under Explorer or under DOS.

I then attempted to run Defrag, but it indicated that there were errors that
needed to be corrected before running. I ran Scandisk – thorough/surface
scan – although it took several hours there were no errors. I then started
the defrag process and let it run overnight. We had a temporary power outage
– off and then back on – early in the morning which caused the computer to
reboot. Well, when it came back on it had an error message – Explorer has
caused an invalid page fault in explorer.exe. I tried a recommendation to
boot up in Command prompt and rename C:\explorer.exe to explorer.old. It
indicated that it could not find it in C:, I then renamed the explorer.exe in
C:\Windows. That didn’t work either.

I decided to reinstall Windows 98 SE over my existing installation.
Everything was fine until the final boot. Same explorer.exe error. Then I
decided to extract explorer.exe from the CABS file on the CD. Reinstalled
Windows again – same explorer.exe error. Left the computer on and came back
an hour later and found that it completed booting up with several errors.
Closed the errors and Windows is running, but I’m not sure it is without any
problems.

Any suggestions or thoughts?