POL, FFXI... all of it, fucked.

[In Flames]

So i made a post in the maintenance thread regarding this but no answers, so i may as well put it here in hope of someone knowing what they're doing helping me.

Last night: I go afk for an hour or two, come back to find my PC is having all sorts of problems. Symantec tells me that "bloodhound.unknown" is on my pc and needs fixing. This is popping up literally every 15 seconds or so. Then my pc grinds to a halt, i can't load anything or do anything. I reboot. Everything seems to be fine, there is no bloodhound message anymore. I install the newest version of norton(yeah i know...), do a virus check, it says there are things in quarantine that need deleting. Ok, so i let it do that and go watch a movie. Come back, it is still trying to delete these quarantined files. So i decide fuck it, turn the PC off for the night.

This afternoon i turn the pc on. Everything is normal, no viruses etc.. I try to boot up FFXI. This happens:

http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f1...lamess/pol.jpg

I cannot load with windower or the normal fullscreen. So i talk to a rep on the website, asks me a few useless questions, tells me to reinstall the game and POL. I do so. This happens:

http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f1...amess/pol2.jpg

I have directx 9.0 installed. Reinstall POL and FFXI and all packs again. Same message appears. I'm kinda lost at this point so i decide to perform a system rollback to the 10th. Now i have this:

http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f1...amess/pol3.jpg

And now i'm stumped. Only thing left i can think of is basically moving all my music, documents etc. on to an external hard drive and reformatting.

I read that a few people had a few problems with windower in the maintenance thread but they had fixed it. This is not going to be fixed it appears.
---Bear in mind--- that i have tried booting up with the windowed and fullscreen versions every step of the way. Neither have worked.

So now i have this big red x with no text at all, i don't even what i should be attempting to fix.

I'm seriously at my wits end with this piece of shit playonline viewer. Any help would be appreciated.

[Reality]

corrupted system files, in my opinion, possibly due to the virus that was found.. may have totally fubar'd your OS install

i'd just reformat and reinstall

[Amele]

Reality speaks the truth.

if you hadn't already done a rollback and failed I'd have suggested trying to repair any system files that got corrupted and moved to quarantine (and possibly reinstalling dx 9.0c) and; failing that; do a rollback with the expectation that you'd need to do a total rebuild.

do a reinstall, hope you keep your datafiles(pics etc) somewhere other than the os drive; heh.

[In Flames]

The rollback and a fresh install seems to have done the trick...

Checked over 20,000 files, downloading 10,214... oh joy.

[Reality]

also a good idea is to check regedit and look in your HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Run, and your HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run sections to see if there are any listings that look suspicious to you (Obviously don't go deleting anything you don't understand, but if you know something doesn't belong there, delete the key). Also run msconfig, click the startup tab and do the same thing, look for anything that doesn't belong and remove it

just my two cents