Neil writes:

> I have exactly the same problem on my wife's Pavillion as well and had just
>  discovered
>  the problem on Saturday night. I had installed a network card and done some
>  net
>  configuration, after which the system would hang in wininit.exe. In
watching
>  the
>  system thru McAffee I noticed that something spooky/shifty was going on
with
>  the pc as a network address was infront of the full path of wininit.exe,
and
>  occasionaly
>  the system would look in a bunch of directories that seemed associated with
>  reporting
>  the type of software and the packages you have installed.
>
>  I have also seen the keyboard driver hang as well.
>
>  Up until now I thought that it was some sort of worm virus, as somehow
>  McAffee scan
>  has become disabled. I also found a really strange vb script. I had McAffee
>  turned on
>  and was looking at executables only unfortunately.
>
>  I really have no clue what is going on with it, and I was considering
trying
>  a scanpm
>  off of an emergency floppy, or buying Norton anti-virus and seeing if this
>  was a
>  known virus. Searches on the popular virus sites reveals nothing.
>
>  The fact that this is pavillions is very suspicious.
>
>  Let me know if you find anything and I will do the same, but I'm getting
>  increasingly
>  angry about this, especially if this is associated with some sort of
service
>  that says
>  ok, let me go look for new versions of software for you, which is what I am
>  beginning
>  to think that this may be. The Pavillion that my wife has is an 6640C.

We bought two Pavillions a little while ago -- and as some of you may
remember from my tirades then -- and I was about as grumpy a consumer as you
could find. They were essentially unworkable devices as they came from HP.
Worse, they had any number of background programs that were on the process
stack that were there to assist me (in part to operate all of the additional
buttons on keyboard, but also in great part to assist me in shopping the web,
directing me to their chosen URLs).

As they came from the factory, the PCs were unusable, and no one here would
use the things. Ultimately, to get rid of all of the HP-added, non-Microsoft
software that was simply killing performance, I scrubbed their discs clean
and installed a non-polluted version of Windows from one of our Dell
computers.

That was a ten-hour ordeal for each of the two devices, having to disassemble
the machines and get the part numbers of every peripheral device inside them
so that I could download the proper drivers, but both of the Pavillions work
very well now. As I also said then, I was greatly impressed by the quality of
their construction. They're two of the nicest built PCs I've ever seen, but
the software that comes with the devices was so abominable that we'll never
buy another one. Heck, we wouldn't even take one if it were given to us. I
only invested the time in rebuilding these two because I had already bought
them.

Neil's description of "angry" did not begin to cover my initial reaction when
we first started to use them. Indeed, if I remember correctly, having the
machine log on and report back statistics to some central location was a
"feature" of the HP-added material -- and a screen pops up once and a while
saying that you never completed your questionnaire if you initially refused
to register your machine (as I never do). I strongly suspect that some of
that software that we eliminated did dial back every so often, but it
certainly doesn't do that now. Our Pavillions are now more Dell-like than
they are HP, and they're all the better for it.

Wirt Atmar