This customer has a lot of strange things happen on his PC.

Musicmatch jukebox and win media player don’t work well (either they don’t start, or computer slows to a crawl), the internet often stops working, his front usb ports don’t work anymore, the PC is very slow, and he wants to learn about backups and making music CDs (using nero 5.5…).

The front usb ports have had the plastic “tab” broken off, so that cannot be salvaged. I order in one of those multi-everything front panels (ie 2 usb ports, various card readers, firewire, audio in/out).

PC only has an outdated virus checker, so I recommend AVG anti-malware.

Given all the different types of problems, I decide it will be faster to work on it from the office.

I remove a few infections, and tune the PC.

Win media player seems to work correctly, and overall everything works well.

I take the PC back, then finish setting up AVGAM. One of the questions asked is “do you want to run a regular scan of the computer”… the choices are: low priority scan, high priority scan, no scan. I pick low priority scan, since they have had many problems in the past.

A few days later, customer calls back, asking it is now slower than ever; it still freezes, and wmp and music matchbox still don’t work.

Hmmm, I go back, restart the PC, and the AVGAM scan really hits the PCs performance. I figure that since I’ve already scanned the PC, then a regular scan isn’t good if it impacts the performance for a few hours per day.

I try starting WMP, and it works fine. I’m told they prefer musicmatch, so I give it a go, but it refuses to start. No error messages. I reckon it encountered a corrupt file, and refused to start.

I eventually need to restart the PC, as its running slow again. Very odd behavior. While shutting down, windows says the musicmatch program is not responding… do I want to terminate the process?

Now I see whats happening. Musicmatch is starting, but due to some problem, it cannot start the graphical front-end.

So I uninstall musicmatch, and everything is now working well. Customer say he will download and install musicmatch again.

So I have learned another lesson: when starting a program, if nothing appears, it might still be in task manager (waiting to be killed off).