A new customer had a laptop that was behaving very strangely.

• After startup, it would show: not enough quota is available to process this command
• Event viewer would have a few errors about microsoft management console failed to create empty document
• Most of the top bar of each window was missing (transparent)… except for a thin horizontal bar, and the 3 close/maximise/minimise buttons.

He also mentioned that windows would report that the firewall was disabled.

Naturally, the laptop behaved normally when I started it… but after 30 minutes, and after a restart, it showed its true colours.

It became almost unusable. it was very slow, many applications wouldn’t start (including control panel and regedit)…

I felt like my hand were tied behind my back… most of the tools I would normally use were unavailable.

I was just about to take the drive out and scan it from the office PC, when I decided to just start killing processes using task manager…

I made sure I didn’t kill any important system processes, and started with processes starting with the letter “A”.

After about 3 killed processes, the PC suddenly started to work normally.

Since the customer said that the laptop just didn’t operate normal since he renewed trend, then trend was the first thing to uninstall.

I then disabled various intel proset wireless services and startup applications, as they seem to be implicated in the “quota” errors (particularly the “ownershipprotocol” service).

I also do my usual services and auto-startup cleanup, install antivir, winpatrol, spywareblaster, restart the xp firewall (and reset it to its defaults).

After all that (and a cleanup of temp files and a defrag), the PC is working the way I’d expect it to.