We have a number of client machines on a domain that have decided to start exhibiting some strange problematic behavior this morning. All machines are Win XP SP3, fully up to date with patches and symantec av. Several different virus scanners have been tried (separately, of course), and nothing found. The symptoms of the issue are:
- A number of Windows services are not starting.
- No or half height taskbar. No start button, can't resize.
- Upon trying to open Internet Explorer we get the message "Windows cannot find '(null)'. Make sure you typed the name correctly..."
- Opening a document in Word results in the message "This document could not be registered. It will not be possibe to create links from other documents to this document."
- Opening excel results in two messages: "Cannot use object linking and embedding" then "An error occured initializing the VB libraries (14)"
We can use CTRL-ALT-DEL to get to the task manager, and from there run explorer and other programs to get into things to look, but this is really baffling me and our admin. Does anyone know what could cause all of this to happen at once on so many machines? Thanks.
Edit: Seemed to be fine for a week, but it's back. Some machines have varying degrees of the above symptoms.