What's the weirdest problem ever encountered?

I need to go to bed, but I can't sleep, and this just hit me... Lots of us have encounted many weird things with computers, but who has the most odd?

Me... I ordered a motherboard to use some of my old parts in a few years back. It worked great for a while, but then suddenly I got display problems. Basically any compressed image or video would show up as if it were highly compressed. Things would look fine on other machine, it was just this one. Even windows defaults looked messed up! Videos would have lines going though them...all grades of crap. Oh yeah, I could take an image, one that once looked fine, open it, then save it and it would be all messed up as displayed(so it wasn't just showing them wrong, it was processing them wrong!) People said it was the video card, but I tried different AGP and PCI card with no sucess. I tried different copies of windows, but it didn't help. Nor did RAM or a PSU.

On top of this, sometimes the machine wouldn't POST. Many times I'd just get a black screen, sometimes I got a CMOS checksum error. However, when it got started, it was fine. Eh, but one day, after about 10 tries, it wouldn't POST. I took out the good stuff and destroyed the motherboard so I wouldn't waste my time on it anymore .

Hi Dig~ and congratulations, I believe that this has the makings of a very interesting and possibly amusing thread.

It was early January 2000, and the owner of my local "watering hole" has contacted me because his daughter's PC was "acting strange"...............so after Mass on Sunday he drives me out to his place and I take a look.

It was a Fujitsu-Siemens of German manufacture, and the manufacture date was sometime in 1996, so it was running Windows 95. It was displaying only in the top left quadrant of the screen, and did not perform a lot of functions that it should.

I was into my third "Nelson's blood" when a program kicked in..................it was Thunderbyte AV............I killed it and took a look............it was set to run automatically, and to clean files, or delete them if it could not clean.

Now, it was looking at files that now had a date that Windows95 could not handle, and assumed that they were infected because of the weird date rendition.

It, therefore, was deleting anything that it could not understand and clean.

I think that Thunderbyte were taken over by Norman Defense Systems in 98 or 99?..........the user had not updated, because the thing wasn't even connected to the internet :D

Well, that is my first contribution :)

Cool thread.... The moment i saw the title i started thinking what would be the best incident that suits here and this hit me first: -

Well this is the most recent problem that occured and the day i was planning to post it on AO for solution thank GOD i managed to solve it: -) It goes like this one of our Deputy Manager (female) report me that her outlook is acting wired, it gave to much of errors and get closed and she hardly managed to send any email. I removed it from her system and installed 2003 in it and one day it went ok but next day she called me and said now she is receiving a message word has encountered an internal error it will....... blap blap so i said ok i will switch it back to the old one..... Man it took me whole day to remove it and install old one cause it was creating too much problen and in the end old got corrupted too..... I could not find other alternative then reinstalling Xp but after that same problem occured.
Thankfully my Sr Manager got back and he said there is some sort of incompatibility with the hardware thats why outlook 2003 doesn't work. We discussed things and came with the decision to change her box....... Mind you she is physco...... got her system setup everything attached her old emails and rest and the same evenining she complaint about the same problem, we again removed and install office but things remain same....... She was like Fever for Brain ...... pinging pinging ..... anyways even my Manager got hopeless cause we have even deattached her old emails...... I was sitting and praying for some sort of miracle to occur so that her problem could get solved and i can live happily.... the moment i realize i have eliminated everything from outlook even her signature (which were all from her old system) and i realize OUTLOOK.NK2 file (the one that auto-complete email addresses) is the one from her previus box so the moment i removed that things got back on track smoothly.

Its been almost 24 hrs or more and not a single complaint about her outlook thanks GOD. You know this whole incident i am talking about took 5 days... I mean from last 6 days i was getting F**ked by her......

So that the most weirdest problem occured during my work......

:D

One of my first computers (running windows 95) completely died one day when i was surfing the start menu. The screen went completely black except for a string of white numbers scrolling across it. I tried a different tower on it and the same thing happened, so i assumed it was a monitor problem. I then went out and brought a new monitor but the same thing happened!!! so i can only assume that it was both pieces of hardware but that seems highly unlikely.......its still a mystery

Clients system that would intermitantly reboot itself. checked into heat issues and the bios had the temp sensor running no heat alarms ever whent off. OS looked fine. Finaly whent out there and opend up the system...a family of mice had moved in for the warmth and kept shorting the system out.

I just got an internship in the IT department of large corporation. My supervisor and I got a call that a user is having problems with an excel spredsheet.

This spreadsheet has something to do with income in '06 (I'm new, I dont know much about the company still) all the other ones like it ('05 and '04) work fine.

This spreadsheet will only open if the '05 one is open and maximised (and me and my super don't that great of knoledge of excel so we have no clue why its doing that).

this happened to me back b4 i knew anything about pc security, hardware, software or anything. I was downloading what was labeled as a demo for a game called virus which i had previously seen at a computer store in my area with kazaa. When i went to run it this is what i saw. My screen goes blank for about 2 sec, then what appeared to be a maximized dos prompt showed up. It manually went to the C:\ root and typed del. then enter, then type y and enter. It even started to scroll showing all of my files bieng deleted and what not. Well i freaked out at this point and pulled the power on my pc. Fearing to turn it on again i left it sitting there for about 2 weeks when i finally got ahold of a friend that was ot of town who was going to school for something in the pc field, i can't remember what it was but he knew enough to do a lot of different trouble shooting. After i explain what happened i was informed that most likely it deleted something that will prevent the pc from booting and i would have to do a format/re-install. Well we turned it back on to make sure it was screwed b4 formatting it, and a good thing we did too because it booted fine. He then had me install some av softare and scan the file and it came out clean. Stumped, he backed up all my stuff on his external and we ran the "demo" again. Turns out after the dos prompt shows all my files bieng deleted the monitor shows a big yellow smiley face for a few seconds, then says "Aren't you glad this is only a demo?" and then the demo commenced.

That was the last time i ever downloaded an .exe off of any p2p software.

the strangest thing, computer wise, that has happened with me was years ago when I was a wee bench tech.

A customer brought a computer in that had a dead drive. We put a new one in and installed the OS on it for them. Then the new drive died... you could hear the actuator hitting the side of the drive O_o

So we put another one in. Got the OS installed on that one. It also died, in the same fashion. So I ripped the machine apart to see what I could find. I ran my multimeter on everything. I checked connections, I replaced the power supply, etc. Everything tested out ok. So I put a new drive in with the new power supply. Exact same thing happened. So we replaced the motherboard thinking that there was something wrong in there that wasn't coming up when we were testing voltage. Exact same thing happened to the new drive.

Eventually I traced it down to a bad memory chip, if you looked at it under a magnifying glass you could see that one of the pins was crossed with another one. This little thing, on something that should have 0 effect on voltage to the harddrive, was killing harddrives left and right. And it tested perfectly fine with a multimeter...

I actually /still/ have that chip, and that was from 14ish years ago.

Maybe not wierd, but kinda dumb. First off let me explain the I am a field techie that does warranty work for dell and gateway. On-site stuff.

Anyways, get a call issued from dell for new Mo-Bo that states USB non-functional. Go to EU site, replace motherboard, start it up. Eu wants to check that it works, so they plug in usb mouse, still doesn't work. I check device manager, update drivers, etc... nothing. Turn computer around to see if USB port is loose or anything, they were sticking the USB plug into the RJ-45 jack....

'Nother one. short. Got sent out because tablet laptop stylus pen wasn't wroking. Turns out a piece of Mylar type about an inch long INSIDE the LCD fixes it. I'm not talking about on the back or on the connection to the video card, I mean you had to literally open the LCD and put this type in a particular part of the circutry. Fixed it like a charm.

I've told my 'weird computer' story once before I think, so those of you who've read it already and remember, please bear with me.

I call this one: Tale of the $100 cockroach.

I get this trouble call out to a nice young lady's home to fix her system. She says it's acting weird at intermittent times.

Off I go, thankful for a new customer who's willing to pay the nice hourly rate I charged for however long it took me to fix her box properly. My toolbag was packed tightly with everything I'd need to do a complete rebuild of her system if necessary, including operating system masters all the way back to win3.11. An hour of driving later I arrive at her home. It's a nice country mansion looking to value in the quarter millions range. Not too shabby at all. She greets me at the door and escorts me across the house to her office and points me in the direction of her computer desk. She's cold iron off. Ok, here we go...

I light off the box, and monitor and watch as winXP boots nicely as it should. Ok, no problems. I wait until it's all the way to the desktop and play around with exploring her hard drive, running spyware/av utils, and checking her configurations. Midway into the 2nd spyware scan I hear zzzt! and the system reboots. Rut roh. It's a hardware issue.

So I deftly retrieve the box completely from its hidey hole beneath her desk. I set it atop, and begin unscrewing and opening the box...only to be swarmed by several hundred cockroaches who've chosen to call her box home. I think I *might* have discovered her problem.

After the flood of critters subsides, I finish opening the box and find one nice toasted one outside the power supply, and about a half inch of 'roach trash' in the bottom of the case.

I ask the now horrified housewife about a vacuum cleaner and suggest calling an exterminator. In the meantime I run down to the corner store and get a can of Bengal roach spray and proceed to finish evacuating the nasty little beasties from her box. Then I vacuum out the trash.

When I left the computer was working just fine and dandy, and the housewife had been educated as to how these tropical creatures love electronics. Terminix was arriving as I pulled out of the driveway.