Frustrating as Hell problem.... :X

So I have been having problems with my ibook as of late. When booting up it is taking a significantly longer time for the desktop to fully appear with all icons and the bar that runs across the top of the screen is transparent until it fully boots which never happened before until late.

Second I have been having problems with my internet connection. I have been using several different wireless signals (coffee shops, friends network, back home again) and I started having this problem where I wasnt receiving packets. At first I thought it was just this one network that maybe my MAC address was locked out on. Fine, then I go use a different coffee house's wireless and I'm getting crazy bottlenecks on packets received like 2 to 3 packets every few seconds only.

Now I'm using my home wireless network and it's bottlenecking here too. Sometimes to the point where pages won't load at all, the incoming info is sooo slow it appears to just freeze.

I looked at my activity monitor and all the running programs are legit, I downloaded ClamXav and I am presently scanning for viruses (it's been scanning my whole hard drive for over 2 hours now...). I found this folder on my hard drive called sw that i had never seen before and it contained files I had never seen either. I dragged it to the trash and deleted it. I have personal file sharing off so I don't think someone else at a coffee shop or anywhere could've broke into my comp and left viruses on it or spyware or maybe my comp is unwilling acting as a bot and spamming emails and that is bottlenecking my bandwidth? I dont know but I'm ready to pull my freakin hair out.

If my computer is bugged and Clamxav doesn't find anything what do i do? Or if my comp is being used illegally by someone else how can i tell? I have the latest security patches from Apple so if anyone knows what this problem may be plz plz plz let me know what you think.

If it isnt a virus or if it is or if it is something stupid I don't know.

Oh and I repaired all the permissions on my hard drive too if that helps.

Any information you guys have is greatly appreciated. I'm going to try and post this and hopefully I won't time out. Thanks again.

osprey76 said:

Try Repairing Permissions with Disk Utility. Also, get Cocktail and run the various maintenance scripts and clear your caches. That has fixed many a problem for me.

The sw folder was hidden in the Finder and is intended as a user-installed software folder. You probably don't have a virus.

Click to expand...

Wow. cocktail is God. Repairing file permissions was easy but I had to copy paste the sudo blah blah blah into terminal previously to update the prebindings. That program is Hot. Thank you very much.

I emptied all caches as well as anything else that was there to do. I'm hoping it has fixed the problem as I'm not seeing any problem now. I stopped ClamXav from scanning my hard drive as it was now on it's 5+hour with absolutely nothing found.

Is that sw folder important? I trashed it as it was alien to me. I have never seen it before and it was suspicious just being there.

Thanks for the tip. you've made me a happy camper... at least until my ibook acts up again and this time I bring out my "magic hammer" and use that to fix any and all problems.

never used Fink nor have I ever heard of it. I had recently installed Azureus perhaps that was the install folder for it.

Today is the second day and things seem to be working alright for now. I don't have the installer cds otherwise that sounds like a good idea. I setup a schedule with Cocktail to auto-maintain my comp for me.

Thanks for your guys help.