Program window vanishes

Viruses and worms
1

I suspect something is on my system. For no reason the open window of a program will just vanish. It happens maybe once a week and on no particular program. Today my file manager just vanished from the screen Another time it was a game like solitaire. There one second and then gone. On some occasions I have been totally unable to restarted the program with out a reboot.

I have run a scan but have not found anything yet

2

If you have XP, vista32bit or Win2k, you could enable a boot time scan. Right click the avast icon, select Start avast! Antivirus, a memory scan will take place followed by the opening of the Simple User Interface, Menu, ‘Schedule boot-time scan…’ Or see http://www.digitalred.com/avast-boot-time.php.

What other security software do you have ?
If you haven’t already got this software (freeware), download, install, update and run it, preferably in safe mode and report the findings (it should product a log file).

  1. SUPERantispyware On-Demand only in free version.
  2. MalwareBytes Anti-Malware, On-Demand only in free version http://download.bleepingcomputer.com/malwarebytes/mbam-setup.exe, right click on the link and select Save As or Save File (As depending on your browser), save it to a location where you can find it easily later.
3

I suggest:

  1. Clean your temporary files.
  2. Schedule a boot time scanning with avast with archive scanning turned on. If avast does not detect it, you can try DrWeb CureIT! instead.
  3. Use SUPERantispyware, MBAM or Spyware Terminator to scan for spywares and trojans. If any infection is detected, better and safer is send the file to Quarantine than to simple delete them.
  4. Test your machine with anti-rootkit applications. I suggest avast! antirootkit or Trend Micro RootkitBuster.
  5. Make a HijackThis log to post here or this analysis site. Or even submit the RunScanner log to to on-line analysis.
  6. Disable System Restore and then reenable it again.
  7. Immunize your system with SpywareBlaster.
  8. Check if you have insecure applications with Secunia Software Inspector.