Middle Age Geeks

My elderly neighbor up the road has another issue with his pc. This time it's a rundll error. On startup, he gets the message "Rundll error loading tapi.nfo the specified module could not be found".

I don't like playing in the fire that is the registry and he doesn't want to spend the money to get a registry cleaner program. Any suggestions?

Some searching says he may have picked up a bug.

Does Malwarebytes open for him?
What antivirus/firewall program(s) does he use?
What is the date of his virus definitions?
Does he get an error message when MANUALLY updating his virus defs?

I would NOT buy a registry cleaner. Some screw up computers.
(And if you know a bulletproof registry cleaner other than the old one by Juoni Vuorio then please drop me a PM!)

I didn't try to open any myself, but he says all of his anti-spyware programs still work since the error message started popping up a week or two ago. I was wanting to get some solid info about it before I spent too many hours trying to clear this up for him.

Antivirus: MacAfee. Firewall: the standard XP firewall.

He says he updates his spyware definitions at least once a week, so they should be fairly recent. He updates the anti-spyware programs manually, but I think MacAfee updates are automatic.

I'll have to check and see if he's tried manually updating MacAfee. He did say that it ran a scheduled scan just a few days ago, so it apparently still runs, whether or not it's actually up to date.

After doing some due diligence myself, I came to the conclusion that most registry cleaner programs normally seem to end up causing more problems than they solve, so I really didn't want to go that route.

The biggest part of the problem here is that the whole family is not very computer literate. The father is in his 70's and basically only uses it for email and news. The son (in his 40's and living there like a teenager in the basement) uses it for who knows what. They both have a tendency to blindly stumble around online and have probably clicked on many a popup that had some appealing sounding offer. This is the same neighbor that had the antivirus 2009 bug earlier this year.

MacAfee sucks at catching virii/malware. Folks who dont know about computers need the best protection possible because their procedures when they get something fishy are spotty.

They caught a bug. I suggest they install and update Malwarebytes, reboot into safe mode, run a scan in safe mode, remove everything found, reboot into safe mode a second time, do another scan/removal, then remove MacAfee, reboot, then install ESET NOD32. (Not the smart security... its a bit tougher to get to play nice with other programs)

Once installed, reboot the PC into normal mode, update NOD32, then reboot into safe mode and do a NOD32 scan.

If there is a still an error message let me know.

He may not want to get another antivirus program right now. He just recently paid for a two year update subscription for MacAfee despite the fact that I tried to warn him off of it, so I may have trouble convincing him to pay for something new. I've told him your "600 lb bouncer" theory, so he'll certainly move to whatever I tell him to (which will be whatever you tell me) after this subscription runs out, but probably not before then.

I'll try out the rest of your fix tomorrow, though and report back at that time.

kk

Sorry it took a while to get back to this. An urgent job came in and occupied my week. I finally got back around to them last night.

That bug is cleared off their pc now, along with quite a few others that were impeding performance. A big part of the problem came to be the fact that, while they told me they updated their anti-malware programs, they didn't actually know what that meant. They assumed that simply running a scan was "updating", so the programs hadn't been updated since the last time I went up there and did it for them in Nov of '08. I've tried to drill the process into their heads for a few years now, but it obviously hadn't taken yet. I think they've got the message now, but I had thought that before, so we'll see.

I also got them set up with Firefox instead of IE. The difference in how fast pages load pretty much stunned them into silence.


Funny story here: These are some wonderful neighbors, but the son is a bit of a religious freak, although a really nice guy otherwise. He's constantly posting on religious forums and emailing others with his ramblings saying that most people who claim to be Christians are false believers and then quoting obscure bible passages at them to prove his point that we're at the end days. Anyway, he's convinced that these people and others that "fear his beliefs" are purposefully hacking his pc and that is where all of these bugs are coming from. Last year, he was sure that his ex-wife's family (who he says are all "pagans and witches") had hacked his email with a virus because he was a Christian. By ex-wife, I mean they dated for 2 months, got married and then divorced within 2 weeks.

I've tried to explain to him that these things just float around attacking any target of opportunity, but he keeps going back to his own paranoid conspiracy theories.

Not so much funny as sad. To think of squandering your life away like that as a thrall to mythology...

You can't know how badly I want to remotely put a Scientology link as his home page!

Now that's evil. And, of course, now I want to do it too.

I tried to find an extra creepy "Scientology: Join us or DIE!" website and of course couldn't, but hey... I did find something creepy:

http://www.ehow.com/how_2078635_be-scientologist.html