Hello,
On my PC, I keep trying to run a Norton 2005 Virus Scan. It locks in approximately the same spot every single time. I run trend micro house call and it locks halfway through also. I have done a scandisk and defrag, and problem persists. I have run AdAware successfully and it reported nothing. Any advice from any friendly person out there? Thanks in advance.

Try running it in safe mode.

I have... it still locks.

Did you try a system restore back to when it worked properly? If system restore doesn't help you may have to turn it off before you do the next scans below...you could have lots of malware.
Try these and see if they help.
Up-date and scan with this utility
Spyware Blaster
and
Just do an on-line free scan from the link below..remove or delete all problems
On-line Spyware Scan

friendly and helpful for better computing in all areas *smile*

Hi Mac4,

It may not be a virus issue at all. I would begin by running CHKDSK to be certain that there are no probs with the file system and Hdd. A bad sector on the drive or a faulty entry in your master file table could do as you have described.

In WinXP, to run CHKDSK you must:

My Computer => on each "drive" that represents a partition on your hdd (IOW, not CDROM, Floppy, etc) => Rclick, "Properties" => Tab, "Tools" => Section, "Error Checking" => Button, "Check Now" => Opens "Check Disk Dialog". Choose both check boxes and poke "Start" button.

Checkdisk will then open a dialog saying that
will perform its check on the next restart. Poke "Ok" to that and restart the machine.

When the machine restarts a DOS-looking screen will come up and proceed to check your drive(s). It will take a LONG time, and is not very informative. If it auto-reboots back to checkdisk it is likely it found a problem of some kind.

When checkdisk finishes, Windows will boot normally. Try your AV scan again.

Bruce

Somewhere on your system is a corrupted file that when AVs get to they get thrown into a loop. As it runs keep track of the folder it's scanning and when it locks, reboot and examine the files in this folder. Any file you can't open with its application or Wordpad is damaged and should be deleted or replaced. If you can't find one, try copying the folder to a disk and then deleting it to see if that fixes the problem. You may have to reinstall whatever it was that used that folder but it's worth it to get your AV running again.

Sorry... haven't been able to check this thread lately.

Orion, I have paid attention to what file the AV was on when it locked, and deleted the file, and it still locks. I think it might possible be some physical error on the disk.

roamer_l, I have done that already, and it doesn't do anything unexpected. My early assumptions was a bad hard drive.

XPUser4Real, That is not the problem.

I might try to ghost it off of the old hard drive onto a different one and try it on there. Does anybody know any free software that works better than Norton Ghost? I have been having problems with it lately, and have been wanting to explore other options.

Just a thought....D/L either Avast Home or AVG, make sure to up-date it. Make sure to disable Norton and then do a scan with either of the alternatives. I've done that before on a laptop running Norton 2005 and it worked...it's worth a try and doesn't take much time. If you can scan with that, then you may want to dump Norton and go with the free alternatives....it's up to you.
Good Luck

friendly and helpful for better computing in all areas *smile*

I've tried Trend Micro House Call and it locked too. I will try AVG and see if that works. I think it is kind of funny though that House Call locked also.

Not the file, the whole folder. If the file header is corrupt it will lockup *before* the filename is displayed.

If the hard drive is physically damaged you may have to do a low-level scan to isolate the bad sector and mark it unusable before you can recover the data. Not sure what product does that, though.