White label 1.4GHz Duron, 2x256MB SDR (PC133) mem, XP SP2, IE7. About 3-4 days ago things went to hell. Various indications led me to overheating or memory problems. After vacuum/blowing, general cleaning, and swapping some memory around, I was able to somewhat stabilize the system enough to run the repair from my XP CD. Today I bought two new 512MB mem sticks and have reloaded IE. Things seem to be working again, except IE. When I try to run it, I get the blue screen and the Stop Code 0x0000008e. I uninstalled IE on the way to a complete reinstall. But the desktop link remained, and started IE (with the same crash). I found the IE directory in Program Files, and tried to simply delete it. XP says it is in use. So I started deleting files one by one to see which was in use. When I delete IE.exe, about 15 seconds later it reappears. Same for other -.exe and some -.dll files.

Chicken and egg problem: I have a SonicWall firewall, with enforced McAfee. It won't let this machine on the internet without a current load of the AntiVirus. I can only load that with IE. And the first indication I had that there was a serious problem was when the AntiVirus was disabled and I couldn't re-enable it. I was able to install it anew once, before IE quite working, but that fresh copy was immediately disabled. I can allow this machine access through the SonicWall, but have been reluctant to do so with NO protection other than the XP firewall (if that even runs now). I have other machines on my home network, and a NAS to which I can save utilities to run on this machine. Neither of the other two machines has a problem, so it hasn't propogated within the internal network (yet?).

Maybe related issue: Task manager shows that one of the svchost.exe is using 95%-97% of the CPU, with the idle task never running. All this started shortly after installing MS Office Home & Student and Outlook. I'm new to Outlook, and Office was a necessary upgrade from Office 97 which I've tried to use as little as possible. I can terminate that instance of svchost with no apparent problem, and the idle task immediately shows the 95%-97% use.

I'm hoping this is all familiar to someone on the forum. Thanks for any offers of help.

Ken

i didn't read all your post! im in a hurry sorry .
but to install or unistall IE ,go t ocontrol panel ,add and remove programs andon the left side click on add and remove windows components ,IE is in the list ,first uninstall it then reinstall it ,you may need the winxp cd to do this .

I had indicated that I'd done that. But I tried it again, uninstall using add/remove from control panel. That seemed OK. But I could not reinstall IE from either the control panel or from the CD. So I went back to the MS site and reloaded IE7 for WinXP-SP2. That seemed to go OK. However, as before, when I start IE it ALWAYS results in BSoD with Stop Code 0x0000008e. I've run both AdAware (but with quite old data base) and SpyBot (not quite so old data base), and they found a few things to clean. I tried about 3 different registry repair utilities, but they want me to register before they will fix the more than 1000 items they flagged in the scan. And, of course, I can't get on the internet to register.

I did run MS Memory Diag, and it found no problems in 3 passes. I have been TOTALLY unsuccessful in creating a bootable floppy or CD from MemTest86+, so haven't been able to run that one.

I'm going in circles and quite frustrated at this point. I'm about to re-install XP, now that the hardware seems more stable. in case my re-installation yesterday was corrupted by bad memory.

your problem is not likely with spyware but with a driver/hardware conflict ,what usually fixes 8e stop error for me is to boot to winxp cd go to the recovery console and do a , chkdsk /r
http://aumha.org/a/stop.htm