One of those quiet, frantic Wednesdays...

[alexpgp]

Windows did one of those funny things that it does from time to time last night, as I prepared to shut down the machine. I categorically could not close two open Word windows.

No biggie, I thought, and realizing that I was not about to lose any work, I set the system shutdown process going and watched as the windows closed and shortly thereafter turned off my monitors.

This morning, the machine was still on, presumably still in some kind of "on its way to shutdown" condition, so I attempted the three-finger salute (which didn't work), whereupon I turned the machine off by main force (the long button-press of OFF).

After waiting the requisite time for the disk to spin down, I turned the machine back on and everything went well, up until the startup appeared to finish altogether too soon.

Indeed, only a handful of processes had been started, and when I tried to open a directory window, the system threw an error message on the screen that suggested various services that normally run upon startup were not running.

Now this could be the result of some kind of virus, malware, or (at the risk of being redundant) Windows Update. Or it could be a glitch in the startup routine, the result of some file becoming corrupted.

My money is on the second option (unless the problem is due to a Windows Update problem, but the Internet reports no sudden spate of problems along these lines, so I'm not sure how likely that is), mostly because (a) I do have an active antivirus/antimalware suite operating, (b) historically, my behavior online results in only rare encounters with threats (which, granted, would be meaningless for a threat that was encountered and not recognized), and (c) the particular malfunction I appear to be experiencing seems an odd thing for malware to do.

So I'm trying out the system repair option on a Windows 7 system disk, but to do that, I must first decrypt my system disk.

And here I was hoping for a calm, quiet Wednesday, not a frantic, quiet one...

Comments

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

Did you try shutting down those Word application windows with Task Manager? When even that won't work, I've used TM to shut down the word process successfully.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Normally, if I had unsaved work in those files, I would have, but as there wasn't I didn't.

As it turns out (see my next post), the problem appears to be solved and unrelated to that Word glitch.

Cheers...