Question : Properties dialog does not appear

Windows XP SP2. Everything seemed to work fine yeasterday. Today is different.

So I start with OS issues: My mapped drive disappeared. And the directory that should be shared is not shared.

I right click over the directory and click on 'Properties'. The explorer window seems to lose focus (i.e. the title bar goes from dark blue to light blue) but the Properties dialog does not appear.

Answer : Properties dialog does not appear

Svchost.exe is the process many system services run in, so yes, stopping it would cause other problems. Quite a few viruses will make themselves run in it so they don't show up themselves on the process list, and many will also make well known anti-virus programs not run.

I would try and see if any of the free online virus scanners will run.

http://www.bitdefender.com/scan8/ie.html
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
http://www.kaspersky.com/virusscanner
http://security.symantec.com/