purple screen prior to booting? totally spooked!

[kateb]

Hey guys, this is a little bit unusual (so it seems) ... basically, I'm getting this image (attached at the bottom) occasionally when I boot up my computer, prior to the welcome/windows loading screens.

The image itself usually looks like this, although it's not static, it gradates: rolling the purple over the screen and revealing the patterns slowly. Sometimes it's just pure white, although this purply thing seems to be the most common incanation of it.

The thing is, I bought a new computer recently and am running Vista 64 with a completely new hard-drive ... there's basically nothing of my old computer (which ran Windows XP 32bit) in this new one ... ASIDE from one of my new hard-drives, a 160gb Maxtor which contains files from my old computer which had to be sent off for recovery after a seperate HDD had a mechanical failure (the old files were sent back to me on the Maxtor).

I started getting this odd image on my old computer, and now it's literally just returned after having my new one for about a day.

I am so ... well, I don't really know. I'm very confused about it.

Has anyone seen this, or heard of it before? Is it a virus? I'm having some problems running Photoshop/Wacom tablet with my new computer (massive slowdowns on a 2gb AMD Athlon Dual Core with literally nothing else running). Done a full virus scan via Kaspersky, but nothing showed up .... I'm still suspicious.

At any rate ... I'm TOTALLY spooked that this image has turned up on my new computer ............... any help appreciated

[Makaveli213]

Interesting. It looks as if you have a virus or trojan that has hijacked your boot. Try going thru Osiris's guide to spyware removal. See if that does anything for you.

[kateb]

thanks! I'll try that