Mom's Computer - Need help

[jvowles]

Okay, I got the malware off. It wasn't easy, and it took HOURS. That SUCKED, and if I ever find the guy who wrote that particular piece of nastiness, I will become rage incarnate and dismember him on behalf of the world, then nail his head up to a pike outside my house, and every day I will wave to it like Vir Cotto to Mr Morden

Comments

[raithnor]

Try running SFC at a command prompt? Another tack would be to look in the registry for your Mom's user name and see if there are duplicate entries and try to merge them.

Booting to a windows install prompt and running chkdsk /r at the recovery console might help also.

Worst case scenario without a full reinstall? Uninstall everything in Add/remove programs and reinstall the important stuff.

[lacousteau]

Tanya is a local goddess at fixing computer nasties. I'll e-mail her to check out your rant.

[xstylus]

I'm just now heading in to work (to fix customer 'puters with exact same problems) But if you're up date tonight, look me up and I'll help where I can if you're still having trouble. :)

The easiest and most effective move would be to back everything up and reinstall windows, but I assume you've got reasons for not having done so already...

[bacondreamer]

At this point, your best option is to do a repair install of the OS or completely blow it away and do a clean install. Unless ALL of the viruses/spyware/malware are removed and you do a repair install, you're gonna end up having the same problem again. From what you're saying, the virus has done it's job damaging the core OS files and running SFC on it MAY NOT resolve your issues. FWIW, we usually run 8-9 different apps both online and local to check/remove these things and even then it doesn't always resolve the issue. The best permanent fix is to back up, nuke and reload.

Just out of curiosity, you did disable system restore before you ran the removal utilities right?

[raithnor]

Jim,

Let me know if you've been getting "File type not associated error" or something to that effect.

Short version: I got hit with some Malware called av.exe, after excising all entries from the registry it screwed up my file associations so nothing would open correctly. I ended finding a .com file that repaired that part of the registry and I was able to run the Anti-Malware program.

If you already reformatted the system ignore this, if you had something like this try googling: exefix_xp.com When you run it you won't know it's fixed it until you start running other programs.