Where to start diagnosing a problem?

[Dogg Thang]

Any time I've had a computer problem, I've had some indication of where to start looking. But my laptop just started acting up this morning and I've no idea where to start.

It loads up okay but about 30 seconds after startup things go bad. It chugs and things stop as if some other process is beginning and causing problems. But when I look at the task manager, on the occassions when I can get in before the chug, I'm not seeing anything kick in. Then, I catch a glimpse of some error box about a login but it goes to a Vista 'please wait' screen before I can actually read it.

And that screen remains until I force a restart.

But because when it kicks in, it goes to that crash, I have no idea how to begin diagnosing what's up with it. Any ideas?

[Hohum]

See if you can boot into safe mode (F8 during startup). Installed/changed anything recently?

[MonkeyWrench]

Boot into Safe mode and have a look at the event viewer. That should hopefully give you and indication if anything is screwed up.

[Dogg Thang]

Cool, I'll try this even viewer in safe mode. I haven't installed anything but the missus was the last person on it last night so, well, you know...

[Dogg Thang]

The event viewer doesn't seem to be working. Unless this is actually telling me what the problem is. It says - MMC could not create the snap-in. Then gives me a crazy long code - CLSID:FX:{b05566ad-fe9c-4363-be05-7a4cb67cb510}. Google brings up nothing on that so I'm sure nobody knows what it is.

[riku]

do a system restore if you havent already, to anytime your computer was working fine

[Dogg Thang]

Oh that's another weird thing - the only system restore point listed is actually the time I looked at doing a system restore, after the problems happened.

But... I may have sorted it. Having lost two computers to poxy Norton, I believe that virus protection can damage a computer far worse than any virus. But, these days I've been using Nod32, which was recommended. Given my virus protection paranoia, I decided to try uninstalling Nod32. And, so far, things seem to have stabalised.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed but it looks like Nod32 was causing problems.