WinXP, ctrl-alt-del behaving strangely

[JonAdams]

I recently had to reinstall windows on my laptop and now, if I press ctrl-alt-del, instead of the normal program manager dialog I get a window showing current processor usage (see attached picture) which, whilst very interesting, is not of much use when trying to kill a crashed program! Does anyone one know how I can change this to give me the standard dialog?

Jonathan.

[NeilUnreal]

That's odd, it looks like a badly re-sized version of the Perfomance tab from the Windows Task Manager (which also has the Processes tab). Have you tried moving it around on screen to to see if you can get to the tabs or re-size handles? Perhaps it's not adjusting itself properly for the current video mode.

-Neil

[JonAdams]

That's odd, it looks like a badly re-sized version of the Perfomance tab from the Windows Task Manager (which also has the Processes tab). Have you tried moving it around on screen to to see if you can get to the tabs or re-size handles? Perhaps it's not adjusting itself properly for the current video mode.

-NeilThe window can be resized and moved around. No change. I tried running the the task manager program manually (C:\windows\taskman.exe right?) and nothing happened. Could this file have been corrupted somehow? And if so, is there anyway to fix it without completely reinstalling windows (again)?

Jonathan.

[NeilUnreal]

Could this file have been corrupted somehow?

Possibly, or one of the resources it's using. You've definitely got an apparently working fragment of the normal display.

There are trojans that mimic taskman, but since you're using a clean install, that's probably not the problem. However, it does mean that security websites sometimes have lists of known valid taskman file sizes and timestamps. You might try checking against one of these lists -- if the size of your file is off, it might be corrupt.

However, I'm also wondering whether you're not seeing some normal "mode" for the cpu display. Try as I might, though, I can't seem to either get mine into that "mode," or find evidence of this by googling. I'll keep looking.

This is the kind of question my business partner is normally very adept at answering, but for better or worse, he is away on vacation this week. :lol:

-Neil

[JonAdams]

Possibly, or one of the resources it's using. You've definitely got an apparently working fragment of the normal display.

There are trojans that mimic taskman, but since you're using a clean install, that's probably not the problem. However, it does mean that security websites sometimes have lists of known valid taskman file sizes and timestamps. You might try checking against one of these lists -- if the size of your file is off, it might be corrupt.Well, apparently my file is valid (I found the md5 sum and it matched mine). I also discovered that the executable is actually taskmgr.exe (in windows/system32), running that manually gives the same window as pressing ctrl-alt-del. Unfortunately I couldn't find the md5 sum (or anything else to compare) for this file. The md5 sum for my file is fc160ace21c81837692b339d230dd4be and the file size is 136KB. Is anyone able to check their version and see if this matches (I'm using XP professional with sp2 in case that makes a difference).

I'm very tempted to just reinstall :sigh:, this is why I generally avoid windows (I only keep it for playing games!)

Jonathan.