I've been having this problem ever since I formatted... lately I've gotten a lot of .exe errors when I install programs and games (like in Renegade I had a problem where I couldn't patch it cuz it said the .exe file had been modified) well I Read into it on their message boards and they said it was a problem with people Well today I loaded up black and white and when I tried to patch it it did the same thing! and I KNOW it runs on this machine because it ran fine before I did another clean install... various .exe problems like that...... Now I've used panda anti-virus full scans, its online activescan, and tried norton and all find nothing... Although it might be: after I formatted it I created another partition for linux of about 5 gigs out of my 40 gig hd... well it did that but I accidentally clicked on NLFS (or whatever its called, I know its for win2000) and the linux was on that partition... well later I decided I just wanted one big partition again I decided to re-partition back to just one on a fat32 partition for win98... well I did that and everything works now... except I have this recurring problem once and a while... just seems like the characterisitics of a virus... any advice??? thanks

Looks more like a confused hardrive file system after all those partition and format chnages. Run Scandisk in thorough mode to go over all the drive's sectors and clusters and repair them. Then the drive may be more amenable to setting up applications.

If u dont have a problem with reformattinf again I would run delpart.exe to completely wipe the hard drive off any and all partitions. Then try again. You can find delpart.exe on net. Just download it to disk.

and WHAT IF you have a virus! if you got a virus that can't be detected? HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU HAVE IT! for all I care we all have undetected viruses, we just don't know it!

Run an online virus scan at either Panda or House Call to rule out a virus

Sounds to me that you may keep loading a CIH virus off some game you've got from the Net, usually they infect .exe files when you execute them and can infect every other one you execute after that look for a small fix on the Net called cleancih.exe you run it in dos to scan the drive