XP key not recognized all of a sudden

[stride000]

Hi,

I'm taking care of my little cousin's comp once a year at the hollidays when the family get together and last year I had installed ESET Smart security, password protected, set it to automatically block corrupted files etc... etc...

When I went there tonight, noticed the liscence was expired since 22 days and something might have entered the machine as Windows gives a message that the key can't be validated and upon installing the new ESET liscence it as a very hard time scanning. It doesn't proceed.

Anyone might have an idea of how to take care of this?

The XP key is a multi-user one and I have it on my machine at home and at work and everything works fine.

Forward thanks!


PS: I noticed the pnkbstra.exe process that seems fishy.

[JRViejo]

stride000, here's more info on pnkbstra.exe which is legit if either game is installed on that machine.

If you suspect that something got in while ESET was not being updated, use both Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware and SUPERAntiSpyware free versions to find the culprits. Let us know the result. Good luck!