Post by OziRiS on Dec 14, 2015 22:24:21 GMT
Okay, something weird just happened!
I was playing a game and it started to lag out of nowhere. The only thing I know of that can make this particular game lag is if I'm transfering files to/from the HDD it runs from. Nothing else has ever caused it to lag and I've been playing it on and off for 8 years.
So, I shut down the game, open up the Task Manager, go to "Performance" and open the Resource Mmonitor. There's a file running called "rundll32.exe" with a CPU usage averaging 50%. I know what it is and I know it's supposed to be running when I play that game, but I've never seen it take up that many resources before and I've never seen it keep running after I've shut the game down.
Next step: Run Malwarebytes. Nothing.
Next step: Run an AV scan. Apart from a few suspect cookies that have nothing to do with this, nothing.
Next step: Run CCleaner. Just gets rid of the normal crud, but doesn't help with this problem.
Next step: Reboot.
This is where it gets REALLY weird!
The reboot takes a lot longer than normal. As soon as I get into Windows, I open up the Resource Monitor again to see if rundll32.exe starts up and takes up as many resources as before. It doesn't. But something's going on, because it takes almost 5 minutes for my PC to do the full reboot. I keep my eye on the processes, but nothing seems out of the ordinary.
Then I try to open Firefox to come here and ask about it and that takes more than a full minute. This is after I'm sure everything that has anything to do with the system has booted up properly. My primary CPU and RAM hog at this time is uTorrent, using up about 25% of both, but that's perfectly normal for up to 10 minutes after a reboot. Get into Firefox, which loads a lot slower than normal, go here, start a thread, start to type in the title and Firefox just flat out dies on me!
Task manager says it's completely shut down, but when I look at the Resource Monitor, it's telling me that Firefox is running a termination process in the background with 20% CPU usage. This goes on for about 2 minutes, during which I can't open Firefox at all.
It's now been more than 15 minutes since the reboot and uTorrent is still on 25% CPU usage. It seems like it's reading way too slowly from the HDD. Firefox is now up and running again, but it's just strange. Normally it looks like the taskbar is in front of it, but right now it looks like Firefox is on top of it, like it's sitting on a shelf.
I just read online that some types of malware mimic rundll32.exe, but runs from an alternate folder, so I checked to see if that was the case by searching my C: drive for any instances of "rundll32.exe" and found 4 instances of it as a "mui" file and 5 as an exe file. They all seem legit, though. All the files except one are in "C:\Windows..." folders and the only one that stands out is the one in "C:\Windows\Program Files(x86)\Malwarebytes Anti-Malware\Chameleon\Windows", but judging by where it's found, it's most likely just a sample that Malwarebytes uses to detect threats.
Something really weird is happening, but I can't for the life of me figure out what and why!
Any ideas/knowledge on this would be greatly appreciated!
I was playing a game and it started to lag out of nowhere. The only thing I know of that can make this particular game lag is if I'm transfering files to/from the HDD it runs from. Nothing else has ever caused it to lag and I've been playing it on and off for 8 years.
So, I shut down the game, open up the Task Manager, go to "Performance" and open the Resource Mmonitor. There's a file running called "rundll32.exe" with a CPU usage averaging 50%. I know what it is and I know it's supposed to be running when I play that game, but I've never seen it take up that many resources before and I've never seen it keep running after I've shut the game down.
Next step: Run Malwarebytes. Nothing.
Next step: Run an AV scan. Apart from a few suspect cookies that have nothing to do with this, nothing.
Next step: Run CCleaner. Just gets rid of the normal crud, but doesn't help with this problem.
Next step: Reboot.
This is where it gets REALLY weird!
The reboot takes a lot longer than normal. As soon as I get into Windows, I open up the Resource Monitor again to see if rundll32.exe starts up and takes up as many resources as before. It doesn't. But something's going on, because it takes almost 5 minutes for my PC to do the full reboot. I keep my eye on the processes, but nothing seems out of the ordinary.
Then I try to open Firefox to come here and ask about it and that takes more than a full minute. This is after I'm sure everything that has anything to do with the system has booted up properly. My primary CPU and RAM hog at this time is uTorrent, using up about 25% of both, but that's perfectly normal for up to 10 minutes after a reboot. Get into Firefox, which loads a lot slower than normal, go here, start a thread, start to type in the title and Firefox just flat out dies on me!
Task manager says it's completely shut down, but when I look at the Resource Monitor, it's telling me that Firefox is running a termination process in the background with 20% CPU usage. This goes on for about 2 minutes, during which I can't open Firefox at all.
It's now been more than 15 minutes since the reboot and uTorrent is still on 25% CPU usage. It seems like it's reading way too slowly from the HDD. Firefox is now up and running again, but it's just strange. Normally it looks like the taskbar is in front of it, but right now it looks like Firefox is on top of it, like it's sitting on a shelf.
I just read online that some types of malware mimic rundll32.exe, but runs from an alternate folder, so I checked to see if that was the case by searching my C: drive for any instances of "rundll32.exe" and found 4 instances of it as a "mui" file and 5 as an exe file. They all seem legit, though. All the files except one are in "C:\Windows..." folders and the only one that stands out is the one in "C:\Windows\Program Files(x86)\Malwarebytes Anti-Malware\Chameleon\Windows", but judging by where it's found, it's most likely just a sample that Malwarebytes uses to detect threats.
Something really weird is happening, but I can't for the life of me figure out what and why!
Any ideas/knowledge on this would be greatly appreciated!
