edmunds%gandalf.nosc.mil@nosc.mil (Daniel G. Edmunds) (09/07/90)
Well, I think my Mac IIcx has come down with a strange virus.
Seemingly unrelated weird goings on have cropped up in the last two
days. Not all at once, but gradually. I have run Disenfectant 2.1
scans on numerous occasions and turned up nothing.
The first thing that happened was that Finder Sounds just stopped
working when I closed a window. Everything looked OK, but it just
wouldn't work. I ran Dis 2.1 and it said that Finder Sounds had a
corrupted data fork. So I removed it from the system folder and
continued on.
Later that day, I tried to print out a Word file on my PaintJet and I
got a "The application 'Microsoft Word' has unexpectedlly quit (1)" I
tried again and got the same message. I tried again with the printer
set to draft mode only (the other attempts had been "Best" mode) and
it worked. Hmmm.
This morning, Iwas editing an AutoCad drawing and the printer began
printing out a constant stream of three ascii characters in a
repeating pattern whenever the mouse was idle. As soon as I moved it
or clicked, the printer would stop until the mouse was idle and I
wasn't in the middle of a command. Then, suddenly, it stopped
printing when the mouse was idle and began to do it whenever the
pointer was moved off of the drawing window and onto a scroll bar or
pull down menu (as long as the button is not depressed) I should point
out that no printer was selected on chooser. In fact, I had selected
another printer just to see if I could make it stop doing this. No
luck.
I have tried reinstalling the system (6.0.5), rebuilding the desktop,
runnig with Finder on and Multifinder off and vice versa. The only
recent change to my system has been a Kensington Turbo ADB Mouse that
is installed in the same port as my old mouse had been in. That was a
hardware change only, no software was involved.
As you can probably tell, I am a new Mac user, and know little about
the inner workings of this thing. It could be a hardware problem, but
the seemingly unrelatedness and weirdness of these problems makes me
think that, I can't stop myself from saying this, my APPLE has a WORM
in it.
Anything sound familiar to anyone?
Dan Edmunds (619) 672-0975
edmunds@gandalf.NOSC.MILrww@demon.siemens.com (Richard W West) (09/11/90)
Daniel G. Edmunds wrote about some strange problems that looked like a possible virus: > >The first thing that happened was that Finder Sounds just stopped >working when I closed a window. Everything looked OK, but it just >wouldn't work. I ran Dis 2.1 and it said that Finder Sounds had a >corrupted data fork. So I removed it from the system folder and >continued on. > >Later that day, I tried to print out a Word file on my PaintJet and I >got a "The application 'Microsoft Word' has unexpectedlly quit (1)" I >tried again and got the same message. I tried again with the printer >set to draft mode only (the other attempts had been "Best" mode) and >it worked. Hmmm. Strangely, my problems began quite similarly. Finder Sounds, one day, decided to stop working. At the time, I did not know why, and I just thought that maybe it was due to the fact that it was a piece of shareware with some sort of time delay on it (you know, to make you pay for the use of the program). I did not bother worrying about it. Later that same week, I had installed Pyro! 4.0 on my system, and things went haywire. Applications, when run, would give me the "unexpectedly quit" error and so forth. If I restarted the system, things would run fine, (for a while) which I thought was odd. I realized that I could not have this continually happening on such a frequent basis, and considering I am the Macintosh nut in the building, I needed to discover what was going on. Well, I finally discovered that the problem was directly related to my system heap size. I had been using the installed system (6.0.4) with a bundle of INITs and the like, but I had never changed the system heap size from its original 128k. Once the system heap was enlarged enough to handle all of my INITs as well as QuickMail and Pyro!, everything has worked like a charm; no problems at all. Try increasing your system heap size, or just check the size of your heap, by using one of the many utilities out there. I used an application called "Inflator" by PCPC products (it was packaged with their network backup software) and it worked well. There are plenty of others out there, and I would suggest to try them. - -- - -Rich West Internet: rww@demon.siemens.com Siemens Corporate Research and Development Laboratories in Princeton, NJ Disclaimer: These opinions are mine. They may be yours; they may be the company's. Then again, maybe not.