A friend has asked me to look at his laptop which has been played with by his 'nephew'. It's a bog standard Toshiba C650 which is used for nothing more than webmail (I kid you not). Said nephew has installed GTA IV and a number of other items appear to have come along for the ride.

I was asked to have a look because it was 'running slowly'. One boot up several dialog boxes come up saying they cannot be started and they appear to be GTA related. I removed the trial version of Norton's as it was popping up every five minutes and downloaded MSE, but it wont install. I double click on the download, a dialog box appears as if its unpacking something but it goes away and thats it.

I saw the start menu was saying 'updates to install' so I rebooted, but nothing is installed. I tried the windows updater, nothing. Now after reboot it says there are updates to install and it needs to shutdown. I shutdown but nothing is installed. I've tried stopping the WU service, clearing the directory, starting the service again but nothing.

There has only ever been one user (that I'm aware of) and I cant access any of the control panel items. The window will open and there is a click when I select something (user accounts for example) but nothing starts. I opened the default admin account but that gives exactly the same issues, it's as if there is no admin rights on either user.

If I try to run 'services.msc' it tells me MMC cannot open the file, it does not exist and this is the same for all MSC files.

I've scanned it with ccleaner, malwarebytes and spybot and its all clear.

I'm a little stumped. I've tried everything I can find on the web but am thinking my only option is to reinstall W7 over the existing install to see if it will repair it.

Does anyone have any ideas ?

 

Cheers