Another one from the backlog.
The day Ishaan reached Delhi, I received an urgent call from him. He urged me to come over and save him from Zubin, who was intent on violating his modesty (such as it is).
I reached Ishaan’s hosue, and persuaded Zubin to cease and desist, after which Ishaan asked me to help with another problem- a mysterious virus that had afflicted his desktop PC.
Ishaan was trying to cancel his MSN (ISP, not Messenger) service. However, whenever he opened the homepage, the virus would begin to fill the username textbox with random words, preventing him from doing anything worthwhile.
I got down to work.
First, we checked the list of startup programs in msconfig. There were three programs that looked suspicious. We surfed over to Google to check up on them.
Then, the Google search box started filling up with random words.
Damn. Damn damn.
We tried again. This time, deft mousework, and skillful use of the delete key assured that we were able to submit a coherent search query.
All the three programs checked out as harmless, though.
Hmm.
Then, we hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, and scanned the process list for suspicious running programs (this was WinXP). Again, there were three or four suspicious programs.
We Googled the first three, and they checked out clean.
Then we Googled the last- sapisvr.exe- and that checked out clean too. Perplexing.
But wait. The fourth search result caught my eye. I followed the link.
Guess what?
sapisvr.exe is the Windows XP speech recognition server. Ishaan’s mic was on, and sapisvr was running. And given that Ishaan talks at 500 words per minute, and at a volume exceeded only by combat aircraft taking off, sapisvr obligingly filled up all texboxes it could find with, well, text.
After that, it was a simple matter to disable sapisvr, and Ishaan was eventually able to unsubscribe.
The search result, by the way- available over here, is quite interesting. It’s from a Phillipines magazine. Catholicism and Windows XP are both widespread in the Phillipines. As a result, people there who suffer from the same problem, rather than blaming a virus, fear that their PC has been possessed by the devil.
Which, actually, is not that far from the truth. After all, WinXP is a Microsoft product.