omg. who is dr. watson and where can i kill him? HEEELLLPP!!!!

[largimus78]

What's up everyone?? First post here, had to join cause this seemed like the holy grail of computer info. So hopefully u can help?! I've been researching this all night and nothing had been quite what i need. Just earlier today the dreaded "Dr. Watson error" popped up. Out of nowhere...I had been watching some videos from break.com, had a good laugh, closed my laptop and boom. i start hearing the "new window opening" bloop. over and over. Now let me say i'm in no way technically savvy. I mean i know a little more than basics but as far as registry, system32, and all that stuff i'm dumb. But i love to learn!!!! Anyways i finally got it to go away after a bunch of "stop process" under the task manager. BUT anytime i open a media file, BOOM - error message galore. I'm ALSO getting a "Verify Class ID' error and an occasional "WMI" error. tried to open up control panel, no good. Ran SpyBot, didn't help. So PLEASE, PLEASE PUT ME IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION!!!!

windows xp (not even sure if i've got sp2) ((yeah i know that's bad, but im a student on a budget!!))

 

[Hampton]

Well, hey there and welcome.. if learning is what you like you couldn't have come to a better place and with a better problem to learn from the dreaded "Post Mordem" by Dr. Watson well your first lesson in learning here is to go to Osiris's guide and go through those steps to get rid of the jokes that came along with your AVI viewing but now you don't find funny.. but hey we've all been there..

it is the holy grail for exactly your problem..

Osiris Spyware Guide

Hope this helps and when you get far enough into the guide post up an HJT log for him in the Virus section of the forum.

 

[yosa]

Dr Watson is an old integrated scanning/rudimentary protection utility, it has been spoofed before, you can safely disable it through services or run keys, hit start menu, then hit the run option , type "msconfig", under the start tab these are the programs set to run on startup, uncheck the drwatson; failing that you can delete the registry entry,hit start then run then type regedit and this will bring up the registry,(the registry is your computers way of finding the location of anything on the drive so dont delete anything there unless you need to) , under: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/software/Microsoft/windows/DrWatson; delete this entry, first choose the export option and save it to a location.