I've been working for the last week on a friend's PC running Windows XP, which displayed exactly the same symptoms.

Unfortunately for her, the only course is file retrieval at about £200.

I think we might be looking at a new virus that wallops the file allocation tables, and the only way back is repartition and format C.

Her AVG antivirus was set on manual update, and she hadn't updated for two months. Was yours up to date?

Don T.