Nope, I do not have a USB-anything hooked up.
This is related to my (separate?) problem of not being able to boot up XP; it extends to not being able to boot in Safe Mode, or Last Good Configuration, etc.
This is the most succinct description I have found so far:
Symptoms: 1. When booting in normal mode my windows XP system hangs after displaying the XP logo and progress bar. A black screen appears and then..
or 2. When booting windows XP in safe mode the last driver that shows loaded is mup.sys. Then...
or 3. Instead of XP freezing at mup.sys windows reboots itself repeatedly just after that driver loads.
from the site
http://www.aitechsolutions.net/mupdotsysXPhang.htmlThough in Symptom 1, my system can hang anywhere during the display of the XP logo and progress bar, and during loading of the desktop.
Again, I don't think this is related to this particular malware since this has been going on for months and months and was essentially the reason why I reformatted in the first place. And that didn't fix it for long, of course, though it was better for a time. That's why I've since thought it must be a hardware issue.
Incidentally, for professional curiosity's sake, it is much improved ever since my D: drive got marked with a dirty Chkdsk bit so that Chkdsk will often start after the XP logo disappears, and if I cancel it then XP will load successfully 1 time out of 5, whereas without this happening, XP loads successfully 1 time out of 50.
So in the first link that DavidR just posted, I don't think it'll help me in this case because I do not have any restore points prior to this particular malware, in fact the oldest one I have is Oct. 30, 2007. As for the second link, maybe I can try it but in all honesty I believe this problem separate. As well, the explanation on the link kinda went way over my head after a couple reads and I hesitate to apply fixes that I don't understand though I suppose it couldn't hurt.