During a normal restart, I suddenly found myself looking at an improper shutdown scan on my external hard drive- which wouldn't finish. I cancelled it, restarted again and AGAIN found it scanning and, yet again, not finishing. I'm shaking as I write this because at risk here is 100 gigs of mp3's- very few of which will now play. Winamp shows 0 kbps and 0 khz when I try to play them but a right click for Properties still shows the correct file size. I've got my music divided into folders by artist name and notice that if one song in a folder plays, they all play- if not, none of them play. I know the variables here are extensive but I'm hoping (only for MY sake!) that someone else has faced this problem and figured out what to do about it. Is there some way to force scandisk to complete so it'll fix the errors? As much as I've learned in my year and a half on computers, I obviously have a LONG way to go. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated. If I can add any more information to this, please post the question and I'll be sure to add whatever I can- I'll be watching THIS one very carefully!!!

If you use KaZaa, I hope you are aware there is a new worm out the past few days that corrupts your files and system and can do this type of thing. Its so new, that you have to manually download the latest updates for your virus scan to find it. Not all anti-virus software have fixes for it yet. It will not be picked up by automatic *.DAT file updates untill Friday night. Check with your anti-virus web sites, as some of them have a downloadable recovery tool for the worm. I have seen about a dozen reports just like yours the past few days. Scandisk will not work and hangs. All associated with MP3 files and KaZaa. I have not heard of any solutions. Those infected have not been back on the Internet with any success stories. You could try booting you Windows ME recovery diskette and running scandisk from there and see what happens, but reports say that hangs too. I would actually have to see one of these machines and do a lot of hard work to figgure out what is wrong if Scandisk is hanging from a boot diskette. So right now it does not look good. I would turn it off right now and do the internet checking on a clean machine untill someone comes up with some fixes.

Found the following note on a forum regarding the new worm Benjamin making the round of KaZaa users. While the Klez virus is hitting more machines that all the other viruses combined, the Benjamin worm, in two days, has infected five times as many machines, all with the KaZaa music file sharing software. Following: The creators of a new worm that targets users of the KaZaa file-trading network say they released the code to frustrate Internet users searching for pirated software and child pornography. According to one of its developers, Paul Komoszki, Benjamin is a "controlled test" of a program designed to disrupt the illegal exchange of copyrighted data & child porn over peer-to-peer networks. "We do not want to affect the exchange of legal programs & legal music files. Only users who are looking for & sharing copyrighted files could be infected," said Komoszki in an email interview today. Once it infects a KaZaa user's computer, Benjamin creates numerous copies of itself under file names that may be of interest to other KaZaa users, according to anti-virus firms. Examples include borlanddelphi-full-downloader.exe & Braveheart-Special Edition-divx.exe, according to Kaspersky Labs. "After a few months it could be that there are more Benjamin files in p2p networks than ware-files. Within a few days Benjamin has spread very far in these illegal networks," said Komoszki. According to Komoszki, the pop-up was intended to generate income for the malicious program's creators and to fund the "advancement" of future versions of the software. KaZaa, a popular peer-to-peer network, is infected with a cleverly designed worm. Benjamin, w32.benjamin, also known as w32.fillhdd.a, spreads by disguising itself as a popular film, song, or game title. Once downloaded, it can fill an infect user's hard drive with thousands of copies of itself. Only Windows users of KaZaa can be infected with Benjamin. Because it does not spread by e-mail or destroy data on infected machines, it currently ranks a 2 on the ZDNet Virus Meter. How it works Benjamin infects only users of the KaZaa file-sharing network. When first infected, users will see an error message such as this: Access error #03A:94574: Invalid pointer operation File possibly corrupted. Benjamin creates a copy of itself as explorer.scr in the Windows/System directory. It also changes the following Registry files: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRunSystem-Service"="C:WINDOWSSYSTEMEXPLORER.SCR HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoft"syscod"="00090D64D4700E36" so that explorer.scr is run every time the infected computer is rebooted. Benjamin creates a new directory, sys32, in the infected user's system Registry & changes the user's KaZaa settings so that the new directory is accessible to all KaZaa users. Benjamin fills this new directory with copies of itself. Not all of these copies are the same size; some can include filler that increases their size to two to threes times the length of the original worm. Benjamin spreads by using the names of popular motion pictures, MP3s, games, and so forth; when a KaZaa user searches for a popular title, an infected copy may show up in the search results. The worm got its name from a banner-advertising site that has since been shut down and that displays the following message: Domain closed due to massive abuse. Prevention: A few anti-virus software companies have updated their signature files to include this worm. This will stop the infection upon contact and in some cases will remove an active infection from your system. For more information, see Central Command, F-Secure, Kaspersky, McAfee, or Trend Micro.

JackG & Iain- I really do appreciate both of your in-depth responses to what's become a very frustrating problem for me. I've been all through the Symantec troubleshooting pages- ran the klez removal tool (even though I use Live Update and my definitions were already up to date)and also went through regedit, looking for the Benjamin Worm. Both turned up nothing. I've since removed the drives that had the problems and formatted my c drive to reinstall the o/s. I guess my next question is whether or not this is a case where one of those "drive restorer companies" might not be able to help me?

Dave, had the same problem with scandisk hanging, tried numerous searches and solutions but to no avail. The only thing that stood out and made sense was that the version of Symantec Anti Virus 2000 that was installed in the computer at the time of purchase will not run on Windows ME. Check that out further and let me know if you find the problem......... cause i've got a pain in the hole searching...... I'LL BE BACK

Dave- I know all about the bundled version of Norton- have had 2002 version for almost a year now- but I guess we're STILL in the same sinking boat 'cuz the only thing I see coming is formatting the drives. Let me know if you find something else...