Flashing icons, Windows Explorer stopping, dllhost.exe *32 high cpu usage
Windows 7 Home Premium
Trend Micro Titanium AV
Most noticeable symptom is that the desktop icons & task bar started flashing on and off every 5 seconds or so. You can run other programs when that starts but you cannot run any Windows items like control panel, file explorer etc. You can run Outlook, Chrome and others.
It does not happen in safe mode. It does not happen for about 10 minutes after the computer boots. Did determine that it does happen right after "Windows Explorer has stopped working" message. Also noticed that dllhost.exe *32 process goes really high when this is happening too -- 100,000+.
Ran sfc /scannow. Still happens.
Trend Micro Titanium AV
Most noticeable symptom is that the desktop icons & task bar started flashing on and off every 5 seconds or so. You can run other programs when that starts but you cannot run any Windows items like control panel, file explorer etc. You can run Outlook, Chrome and others.
It does not happen in safe mode. It does not happen for about 10 minutes after the computer boots. Did determine that it does happen right after "Windows Explorer has stopped working" message. Also noticed that dllhost.exe *32 process goes really high when this is happening too -- 100,000+.
Ran sfc /scannow. Still happens.
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Tony Giangreco
If your system is so badly infected that none of those solutions work, then I suggest backing up your data and performing a clean Windows install.
Also try another Keyboard.
Have you made any progress?
It isn't my computer it is a customer's and I won't be working on it until later this afternoon. Just wanted to see feedback on these particular symptoms because I did consider malware, but I see a lot of those and this just didn't quite seem like it. dllhost.exe is in the correct location - syswow64.
Thank you for the responses.
Thank you for the responses.
Have you made any further progress?
It did, in fact end up being malware. Answer included much of my typical malware removal steps, but it didn't feel like malware to me at first, so this helped me go in the right direction.
Thanks for the feed back and good to see that you're up and running. :)