How do I stop replicating short cuts?

What do you mean by fills with shortcuts, to a single file ? Does the whole desktop fill with links to the same file, or does it fill with links to seperate files ? Or do just a few icons appear ?? Im not sure what you mean.

Just trying to get that one in perspective...

Can you hit ctrl-alt-delete and provide a list of what Processes are running just after you encounter this, there may be something running to keep doing this, just for a start anyway..

Unlikely, most virii prefer to do other nasty things, like screw your system up and propagate, than just be annoying.. ;)

Do you have any bootable USB devices connected to the PC when you do this ? If you have a USB device connected to the PC and in the BIOS your boot order is set to External/USB devices before the floppy or HDD, then it may be the cause. Like putting an unformatted floppy in your PC and booting, it will ask for the OS.

Check the boot order in your bios.

I hope Im not assuming too much on the simple side. But thats exactly what it sounds like for that part.

Need to know a bit more for the icons tho, unless someone else has encountered it.

I mean the whole desktop fills with rows of shortcuts to music files.

Seems to be links to various files but they keep coming back even after we delete them.

I'll do that next time I am at their place. That's the most obvious thing it would seem to do but it hadn't occurred to me at the time.

By bootable device do you mean drives and other similar items?

The only USB device she has is a scanner.

For the moment I turned off USB via the BIOS and the system is starting up properly. The scanner is the only device that has a USB connection in her system. I'm more intrigued as to how they were able to recognize the USB ports in windows with that turned off in the BIOS.

Sounds like MP9 may have the desktop set as the music library or something like that. Worth checking those settings.

There's a "boot order" section in the BIOS setup. This is where you specify where the BIOS "looks" for an OS to boot, and in which order. If you have USB device higher than the HDD or CD it's possible that the system will attempt to boot from that and fail to boot at all.

I have noticed that.... But it's got no listing for USB devices. Only has three spots both taken up by the two DVD burners and floppy drive. No mention of the HDD at all in the boot sequence..

It's just strange . It's an MSI board but I'll have to grab the manual off her and have a deeper look at this. What at first seemed straightforward is bugging me now.

The HDD will definately be available in the boot sequence, see what happens if you put it second, after the main CD/DVD drive or even first (this can be a pain when you want to boot from CD regularly though). Worth a try.

Are you sure it is not the boot from USB that you are enabling disabling to make it work, USB devices would still be working if that was the case.

I hate media player so I don't use it much or know much of what it does only that it accesses the internet too freely for my liking. but it could be possible that either in your Registry or in a Config file it is set to place links to media files on your desktop so no matter how many times you delete them, Every time the Registry entry or the config file is read those links will appear on your desktop.

----snip----

It's "viruses", Pòg, or if you want to insist on Latinism, "viri".

----snip----

Ned

--
True Blue FAQ: 
Public key:  http://pgp.mit.edu/   http://www.keyserver.net/en/
Fingerprint: D17C FDD5 BBA8 8687 42E3  C8F2 C9FB 0314 E17A 0CD7

Yeah thats just become apparant to me.. I've always used that word.. hmm.. but you are correct !

8-/

Sounds like a variant of mywebsearch or similar. Grab Spybot, Adaware and HiJackThis and run them in that order. If that finds nothing you have to go registry trawling.

I would be looking at how the 2 x DVD drives and the HD are wired and set. As a (wild) guess I sus that one of the DVD drives is on the same line as the HD and the settings are wrong.

I would make sure the HD is on its own line, and set as master, and the 2 dvd drives are on the other IDE line - one set as master the other as slave.

David - who doesn't know much about W> >

Oooooh fun.....

I've actually gotten comfy with doing that in the past so it's not really a biggie. The registry isn't as mysterious as people make out.

Eventually anyone who wants to save data has to get used to it. :)

Hey hi thanks everyone for suggestions

Found solutions to both the replicating files and the anomalies in the BIOS.....

1 The replicating shortcuts were created by something in the startup routine. When you deleted the shortcuts they kept returning and this was caused by a process in the startup routine...

1. The missing HDD in the BIOS was due to the jumpers on the HDD being set incorrectly. It shouldn't have worked the way they were set but somehow a conflict was being created when you activated USB from the BIOS and the HDD when the system booted.

It's all solved now and system is working