blinking hourglass windows xp

Question

Good morning.  Thank you to those casual users, engineers, IT support staff and all-around benevolent human beings that take the time to help people out.  I am running Windows XP and just got done having the Dell PC cleaned with Symantec Endpoint Protection.  However, I still seem to have a problem in that there is an hourglass next to the cursor point that is flashing on and off every 0.5 to 0.75 of a second or so.  Obviously, something is trying to run/start but I don't know what that is.  I am currently running a full scan of the hard disk using Symantec Endpoint.  Please help.

Answer 1

Since you are running a Symantec product, I would start with downloading the latest Rapid Release definitions.

Next, boot into safe mode and running a Disk Cleanup (right-click the C drive, Properties, Disk Cleanup) - that will delete all the files that are in these temporary locations, as well as IE's temporary files, etc. Perform a full system scan in safe mode.

If that fails to detect and remove any threats, there are some useful tools that are provided by Symantec for help with finding those hard to detect threats.

1. The Power Eraser Tool eliminates deeply embedded and difficult to remove threats that traditional virus scanning doesn't always detect.
2. The SERT (Symantec Endpoint Recovery Tool) is useful in situations where computers are too heavily infected for the Symantec Endpoint Protection client installed upon them to clean effectively.
3. The Load point Analysis Tool generates a detailed report of the programs loaded on your system. It is helpful in listing common loadpoints where threats can live.

Rapid Release Virus Definitions –

http://www.symantec.com/business/security_response/definitions/download/detail.jsp?gid=rr

Power Eraser tool –

http://security.symantec.com/nbrt/npe.asp?lcid=1033&origin=default

How To Use the Symantec Endpoint Recovery Tool with the Latest Virus Definitions -

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH131732&locale=en_US

Support Tool with Power Eraser Tool included –

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH105414&locale=en_US

How to use the Load Point Analysis within the Symantec Support Tool to help locate suspicious files http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH141402

If you are unable to remove the threat(s) from your systems, please submit the suspected files to Symantec or ThreatExpert for analysis. New signatures will be created and included in future definition sets for detection.

http://www.symantec.com/business/security_response/submitsamples.jsp

http://www.threatexpert.com/submit.aspx

Keep us posted on the issue.

Regards,

Thomas

Answer 2

Hi,

After the scan is complete, I'd suggest you follow these steps and check if the issue persists.

Step 1:

Boot your computer in safe mode and check if the hourglass flashes.

Step 2:

If the issue does not occur in safe mode, I suspect a startup or a third party program is causing the issue to occur. I'd suggest you boot your computer in a clean bootstate to eliminate third party software conflicts.

Note: Follow steps from the article to restart your computer as usual.