Dead CMOS battery in laptop?

[defl8or]

Hi, my mothers laptop s acting weird. Every time Windows boots, it goes straight to the firewall settings page, the antivirus presents a welcome message and starting firefox causes the screen asking if you want to make it your default browser appears. It seems to reverting to a previous point in time as though no settings are saved, but the time is correct, which, I assume would not be he case if it was the CMOS battery. Any ideas?

 

[OhSnapWord]

It does not appear to be an issue with the CMOS battery.

 

[1337G33k]

Did you use a battery from another computer? It's not the battery. i promise.

 

[defl8or]

Yeah, the clock thing made me think it wasn't the CMOS battery. It does take a really long time to load the personal settings (windows xp, btw) but no personal settings seem to be loaded. Every time I boot up, every program thinks it's being started for the first time. I may try deleting the user account. It's just one extra icon for the OG to click, anyway.

 

[Michael19xx]

If the clock is fine, its not the CMOS. It very well could be a corrupted windows user account, yes. I've had this happen to me before, too, except my deal was with that AND with files.

 

[Hameister]

If I were you, I wouldn't make myself nuts trying to figure it out. It could be anything from a corrupted registry setting, to mal-ware, or anything in between.

I'd just save your data, and re-install the OS, and it will all go away.