XP Services issues

[ccczone]

A customer brought me in her NB yesterday. She said it wouldn't load windows. I booted it up perfectly fine. However i could not get online with it, nor could i do anything else. Come to find out, well over 3/4 of the services were set at disabled.

I took my print out of Black Vipers site and went through the services, turning them back on. Then everything seemed fine. That is until i rebooted. Then they all went back to being disabled again. The only ones that run is for her AVG. And a few others.

What would cause these to do this? I have ran complete virus and spyware scans as well as a root kit scan. Other then cookies and m web search, it's clean.

I was thinking of doing a repair install to see if it fixes it, but i am curious. I haven't come across this before. And searching google, i'm not turning anything up. So most likely. i'm searching the wrong strings.

The customer is a student at Penn State, but i know they wouldn't have all the normal services shut off on a system. I've seen some weird things come from their IT dept. But this is a little overboard if it is.

Any idea's? Thanks!

[blud]

Windows XP still has the msconfig utility, I would recommend using this utility to try to set which services are on boot. One other thing I would recommend is checking the event viewer for any logs that might indicate that something is changing these settings.

In a very rare case, I once had a person who had actually installed software to prevent 'ANY' changes being made on the system at all, and when you rebooted any changes you had made just get completely un-done. Might want to make sure this isn't the case by creating a test file on the desktop :)

[Dortz]

have you considered also the possibility of a new bot? and checked for any suspicious running services, killbot, reboot, hjt, etc?

Something needs to 'set' services to disabled. Go with blud's suggestion on msconfig as well. Coming from the other end of the stick (I work tech support at U of I, big 10 schools think the same) I doubt it was the support person, cause we may be mean-spirited, downright cruel at times people, but we don't purposely brick machines.