Suspicous behaviour

I am getting paranoid these days. My Windows 98 system works well, but since a few weeks there's this new "feature" and I don't know why it's there:

Whenever I open the "search file" dialog, windows seems to check all drives, and therefor it tries to read the floppy drive (you know that sound when something tries to access the floppy drive when there's no disk in the drive: ratatata!).

Well this isn't a tragedy, but it makes me wonder why this happens now, and not before. Of course, the preset is not "A" in the search dialog, but "C and D". It seems to me Windows is checking all drives, probably including a Network drive and this is exactly the point.

I have also deactivated all new services in the autorun list of msconfig. It didn't help.

Very suspicous... I still hope it's something completely harmless. How can I stop this, what could be the cause? Is there anybody who has some informations about this issue?

Lots of reasons. I can't really explain it but my win95 and even XP used to do this, and I always reinstalled cuz i couldn't figure it out.

you really give me hope :o)

jfk - yes I concur I have had this strange thing on Win 98 too.

I dont notice it these days as my kids use that machine now.

IPete2.

Sorry!

I really don't think it's a virus, More likely something in the Path variable. i've actually got my floppy drive disabled now :P

disabled? I am still thinking about to install my old 5.25" Floppy drive. You never know :)

You can still do that, you know :)

it shouldn't be trying to read the floppy though... should it...

--Mike

Used to have that on my bro's old 200mhz Pentium, bugged the crap out of us, as it did it for every single file you click on in Explorer.....never could find a way to fix it, though as Cyg says I'd suspect it was that.

A link to some possible causes, http://forums.windrivers.com/archive/index.php/t-4840.html

no you were right. someone is trying to store porn on your floppy drive

Hi jfk,

Have you run the updated anti-virus and anti-spyware recently? Did you install any firewall? Did your internet monthly fee increase abnormally(if using 56k connection)?

Sammy
:)

Hehe, no, not at all. well I've installed some tools and of course I think one of them caused it, for some reason. It may be a USB driver that I had to install in order to access a USB storage device. Or maybe an other program.
Well I have to say it happens only the first time after a reboot: when I open the workstation or when I open the search file dialog. Both of them check all drives. It feels as if windows doesn't know if there is a floppy drive so it has to test it first.

Ruz: in fact that's a mean idea to steal data form a machine that is not connected to the internet: simply mark some sectors on a floppy drive as defect, then copy your keylogger data to it. The other machine will then read it and send it "home". Common Anti-malware etc. software won't even read defect sectors. In fact I had some floppy disks with decreasing capacy, and formating them in dos with the /u /c flags turned out the floppy had no defect sectors at all.

hey cool, i could be an uber hackers assistant.
problerm is no one uses floppys really anymore

well in fact you can do that with any removable storage medium.