AboutCarolyn Meinel Expertise I cover Windows, Unix, TCP/IP and Ethernet security questions. I do not cover Mac, Palm Pilot, or other networking issues.
Experience Books by Carolyn Meinel: wrote a chapter for The Hacking of America book (see http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567204600/happyhacker)
My article Code Red for the Web for Scientific American was reprinted in the book Best American Science Writing 2002 (see http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060936509/happyhacker). My book The Happy Hacker: A Guide to Mostly Harmless Hacking is now in 4th edition with a Japanese edition (see http://happyhacker.org/hhbook/).
Question At startup, I always get this prompt which reads:
"The drive or network connection that the short cut "scheduler.lnk" refers to is unavailable. Make sure that the disk is properly inserted or the network resource is available, and then try again."
I have no idea what this is, or where it came from - no idea of what disk or resource it is referring to.
Answer Many, many programs will install a file named scheduler.lnk. If, when you run the Windows uninstall feature, the uninstall process doesn't work right, it could leave this sort of file behind.
The other way this sort of file could be left behind is if your antivirus program removed a virus or spyware program but didn't remove this file. Worse yet, there might be some sort of malicious program hiding that isn't able to start up.
In either case, your computer should be safe for now -- but the error message is annoying. The easy way to get rid ot this -- but it costs money -- is to install Norton System Works. It probably can clean out this file and will also get rid of other leftover, useless things on your computer that could be slowing its performance.
One of the hard ways -- and a way that doesn't always work -- is to click Start --> Run and type msconfig into the box that comes up. This program will show you all the programs that your computer automatically starts when you turn it on. If you see any program that you don't want to run at startup, you can remove it from the startup list.
Another hard way is to run a search for this file using Explorer. When you find it you can delete it. However, if you find two or more files with the same name, then you won't know which is the one you want to remove.
Now if neither the easy or these hard ways don't work, for example if you can't delete this file, or if you delete it and it comes back, then this particular version of the scheduler.lnk file is part of a malicious program. You will need a complete Internet security suite to remove it, as it could be a virus, worm or spyware program.
Let me know if this turns out to be a really difficult problem and I'll give you more ways to solve it.
