About a week ago, i installed some emulators, and the day before yesterday, i downloaded a harvest moon ROM. Could that have caused it?

Also, it wont let me use add/remove programs in safe mode; is there another way to uninstall them?

Read my edit you may be infected with spyware.

depending on where you downloaded it from the site itself probably had viruses and spyware on it itself or the files did. in fact i'm not sure if it's still like this but it used ot be that when looking for roms and emulators there was an 80% chance of running into spyware and viruses unless you looked in the right places.

Roms should only be downloaded either from romulation.net or a torrent I would avoid going to any other site. But if you follow the instructions through the link i gave you have around a 60-70% chance of fixing your error I would guess

the second one?

it says it could seriously mess with my comp if i dont do it right...

i only ask since it seems to be the most user-friendly one that you can do in safe mode.

Follow the instructions carefully and you wont screw it up absolute worst case scenario is a hard drive reformat if something goes wrong which is highly unlikely

okay. so it requires ALL of those things? i.e. the following:

A randomly generated file name that is made up of eight lowercase letters, such as "gbqxmhia.sys," "upzvlbvv.sys," or "jsbmefvk.sys"
A date of January 11, 2005
A size of 14 KB (13,824 bytes)
A hidden attribute that is set

Note A file that has its hidden attribute set displays an "HA" in the Attributes column in Windows Explorer. For instructions on how to view the Attributes column, see steps 5a and 5b of the procedure that is described in the "More information" section.

It has no version, product name, or manufacturer information.

____

i didnt quite understand the part with the note that i bolded...


EDIT: i decided to wait till i can get someone more tech savvy to help me. i dont wanna fuck my whole machine up, so im just gonna hold off for now... however, i was about halfway through those files when i chickened out, and i hadnt found any that matched that description...

You need to go over it completely make sure you follow the instructions in More Information so you understand what its taking about. It may take a few reads but you need to completely understand what it means. Its not too difficult all it does is tell you the attributes which you will need to see so follow the instructions in more information regarding that.

Andro and Triumph are probably the best tech guys here. You should really listen to what they say.

Yeah, i trust them. im doing a virus scan and stuff first... i just meant IRL. like, with someone watching over my shoulder, making sure i dont screw up x.x