Problem: I've been fighting an apparent virus for the past couple of weeks. I'm not sure what it was because I've never seen or heard of the specific symptoms before. Suffice to say that the machine was acting wacky. For instance Internet Explorer seemed okay most of the time during normal surfing. However, when linking to a web site from email, occasionally I would get an unknown error message; the message box wouldn't completely paint and then IE would crash. My printer was also hanging and causing the system to dynamically reboot. Somewhere along the line I tried an XP Repair, but XP Setup didn't give me the Repair option. I started saving stuff for an imminent rebuild but the system degraded so much that I finally couldn't even logon due to recursive BSODs. I really needed to save my email, so I couldn't just blow the system away and rebuild without tyring to save the data.
Solution: After numerous tries and failures at rebooting with the Last Known Good configuration, and unsuccessful attempts to even bring the thing up in Safe Mode, I ran XP Setup. I was thinking all was lost and was prepared to blow away the partition, when suddenly a ray of hope appeared. For some reason this time I got the Repair option during Setup. I ran the Repair, brought the machine up and reinstalled SP2. Once the system appeared to be stable, I backed up my email ........ :o) just in case. (The machine seems to be back to normal, but I'm never sure what "normal" is anymore).
NOTE: I'm using Incredimail for my email client. Incredimail has a very slick backup facility which puts all the email data into a single cab file for transporting to other machines or restoring after disasters. It's much cleaner than another very popular email client that most people use, which has no built-in backup/restore capability.
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