Hi.
Yesterday a technician from Symantec was helping to remove a virus from my
machine. He went into my registry to change some values. (I wanted to the
titles for all desktop files transparent).

Immediately afterward, a strange dialog box began to appear everytime I would boot my machine. The dialog box appeared right after the Windows XP splash screen. It is basically an all white box but with what looks ike "junk/trash" characters in it. Generally there are only three characters. The first character was a like a small rectangle standing on end followed by this: èr. The title of the dialog box was this small rectangle and ç. I have to lick OK on the dialog box and I am immediately taken to the desk top. The characters might change on each boot, but there are two or three and always some random, weird combination.

Any ideas as to what is causing this and how to fix it?

Call Symantec. Next time, make sure the machine boots into Windows and you are able to login properly before disconnecting from ANY Help/Support Technician.

Life's more painless for the brainless.

Sure. I agree.

Can you help solve the problem?

Not without knowing what Reg Key the Tech changed.

Life's more painless for the brainless.

You could do a system restore but that may reinstall the virus.

Jennifer,

Thanks for your willingness to help. I believe that the technician went in and deleted a bunch of keys in the following registry items:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\ Explorer] System Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\ Explorer] Value Name: ForceActiveDesktopOn Data Type: REG_DWORD (DWORD Value) Value Data: (0 = default, 1 = enabled)

There are solutions on the web that talk about the registry values that need to be change. That is what the technician did, I believe.

I knew something was very wrong because on control panel > display > desktop > customize desktop I only had the General tab. I did not have the Web tab. Whatever the technician deleted immediately produced the web tab again. Does this help?

Any help would be appreciated