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My girlfriend is having a problem with her laptop, and I have no idea what to do about it. The laptop is a Compaq running Windows 98 SE and IE 5.5. Two days ago, she started having a problem where the screen goes grey with the text "Secure Mode Wizard: Establish a Secure Connection" on it. She has to Alt+Ctrl+Del in order to get rid of the grey screen and continue on with what she's doing, and it'll pop back up again every so often on her. My first question is: is there any way to disable the program or repair whatever is causing it to pop up like that? Second question: is it possibly a symptom of infection with a trojan or something similar?

Is it connected to the internet at the time that it occurs?

Do you have this program hotkeyed?

Have you scanned the machine for virii and spyware?

beyond hope wrote:My girlfriend is having a problem with her laptop, and I have no idea what to do about it. The laptop is a Compaq running Windows 98 SE and IE 5.5. Two days ago, she started having a problem where the screen goes grey with the text "Secure Mode Wizard: Establish a Secure Connection" on it. She has to Alt+Ctrl+Del in order to get rid of the grey screen and continue on with what she's doing, and it'll pop back up again every so often on her. My first question is: is there any way to disable the program or repair whatever is causing it to pop up like that? Second question: is it possibly a symptom of infection with a trojan or something similar?

Is she using Bluetooth or another Wireless system. The Secure Mode Wizard is used for encrypting comms with wireless peripherals (or deciding which channel to use). If the battery is gioing on a periperal, or the software drivers are buggy, it'll keep losing the signal and then trying to find it again (more likely a driver issue). That's all I know about the Secure Mode Wizard, so it might pay to look Compaq's website (or if you have a peripheral, it's manufacturers website) to see if there are any known issues. That's all i can think of, sorry.

Turned out to be the Logitech pointing device that she had hooked up to it... I had no idea what that wizard even did, so it was sheer luck that I stumbled across a mention of a similar problem with wireless keyboards (Logitech again, incidently.)

Thanks for the help!