Virus like, but

Hi


I've been scratching my head over this one. Fortunately I've got some
history on it. The behaviour is a bit virus like, but only partly, and
no AV picks up anything wrong.

A total of 3 machines from the same place are having the same problem.
Filesystem runs at normal speed at first, but after several directory
changes/moves/deletes etc, it slows down to a fraction the speed. It
winds up taking 25 seconds just to change directory, and small file
transfer speed drops to 2 per second, down from I'm not sure but maybe
10x that.

All the machines are running 98se with FAT formattd hdds. Not sure
whether FAT16 or 32.

History: when contents copied from machine 16's FAT HDD to another,
this problem began occurring on the newer machine, machine 233.
Accessing the directory on the new hdd that contained the older
machines files tended to trigger the bad behaviour. Over time,
accessing this area of data was no longed required for problems to
start.

Machine 233's hdd was copied to machine 800: that now has problems.
Machine 800's hdd was copied to an NTFS hdd, which behaves fine on
machine 18 (NT system).
Machine 18's hdd was copied to machine 43 (FAT/98), and initially
machine 43 was ok. Data was moved via floppy from machine 800 to
machine 43, and now machine 43 is misbehaving as well.

shutting down and restarting explorer gets it behaving again, but bad
behaviour quickly reoccurs, within a minute or so when doing lots of
file moving/deleting etc.


Machine specs:
machine 233: 233mmx, 32M, 98se, FAT
machine 800: 800MHz, 256M, 98se, FAT
machine 18: NTFS
machine 43: 433, 128M, 98se, FAT

Me: puzzled.

When the fs slows down, cpu use remains firmly at 100% while it does
its slower workload. When it slows, it slows progressively more and
more. I've seen on machine 800 that CPU use tends to idle at about 30%
when this problem has happened, and only rebooting fixes that.

Whatever it is seems virus like, though no data has been lost or
damaged, nothing more than slowdown. Most of these machines have a
firewall running and sensibly configured, though machine 16 probably
didnt (machine long since gone) and 43 doesnt. All have upto date AV, I
think AVG in all cases.

In other respects, all machines seem to be fine.


Any clues on what it might be? Or where to start? For once I'm a bit
stuck. I've got access to machines 800 and 43.


thanks for any thoughts, NT

.

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