Computer virus kills my FOF

[M GO BLUE!!!]

My laptop got hit by a nasty virus/malware/spybot infection this week. The IT guy at my job is all gung-ho about finding it & hooked me up with several programs to battle it "We'll get this bastard!" Even he is impressed by the resiliency of it. I got the computer mostly working fine now, but it still won't update any of the antivirus' I have or allow me to go to their websites (I can update in safe mode, and that's where i run the programs... it finds more.) It even still is changing my homepage. No matter what I do, it still can't seem to fix it completely.

There are only two programs I have found that are completely f'ed. Itunes and FOF. Both do the same thing: try installing the program when I try opening it. If I uninstall & reinstall, AVG thinks the .exe is a virus.

Should I just wipe the computer & go through the awful process of reinstalling everything?

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by M GO BLUE!!!

My laptop got hit by a nasty virus/malware/spybot infection this week. The IT guy at my job is all gung-ho about finding it & hooked me up with several programs to battle it "We'll get this bastard!" Even he is impressed by the resiliency of it. I got the computer mostly working fine now, but it still won't update any of the antivirus' I have or allow me to go to their websites (I can update in safe mode, and that's where i run the programs... it finds more.) It even still is changing my homepage. No matter what I do, it still can't seem to fix it completely.

There are only two programs I have found that are completely f'ed. Itunes and FOF. Both do the same thing: try installing the program when I try opening it. If I uninstall & reinstall, AVG thinks the .exe is a virus.

Should I just wipe the computer & go through the awful process of reinstalling everything?

That sounds at first thought like the conflicker virus, one of the later strains.

There are ways to remove it without wiping the entire system, but the amount of effort and time involved could be more than you want to invest, plus you might not be sure to get rid of the entire thing.

My personal thought in cases like this where you don't have important work information that is not backed up, or anything that you can not fully recover would be to just simply use scorched earth approach of completely wiping the entire thing (including the MBR) and start from scratch.

Nothing like a fresh OS to let everything run snappy for a few weeks anyways.

[AgustusM]

It has been my experience that when they get bad like this a rebuild is far easier - take half a day, where as constantly chasing all the malware possibilities can take weeks.

[Dutch]

There is no honor lost in wiping and reinstalling your OS to void a virus. There is money lost trying to fight it for days on end.

[MizzouRah]

Have you ran superantispyware? That is the BEST free antispyware program around. We use it at work all the time when a user gets spyware/malware.

[M GO BLUE!!!]

I run AVG, Superantispyware & Malwarebytes.

When I finally got it to update (in safe mode fore Super... & Malware..., downloaded to flash drive & manually updated for AVG) Malware... found 86 infections, Super... found another 38 & AVG 25. It's down to finding 1 or 2 infections each when I run them now (in safe mode, normal scans typically come up clean. I also update before every scan)

[MizzouRah]

You must of had a bad case of malware..

[k0ruptr]

I think wipe it is a winner.

[M GO BLUE!!!]

Wiped it. Started over with XP Professional (rather than home) 3 partitions on the drive. This is gonna rock.

Other than I had a problem with the audio card driver, found a forum site that had the same problem discussed & linked to the driver. The driver did the trick, but ended up not actually downloading from Dell. I got another trojan horse attacking me.

Rinse, repeat.

[Coder]

Originally Posted by M GO BLUE!!!

Wiped it. Started over with XP Professional (rather than home) 3 partitions on the drive. This is gonna rock.

Other than I had a problem with the audio card driver, found a forum site that had the same problem discussed & linked to the driver. The driver did the trick, but ended up not actually downloading from Dell. I got another trojan horse attacking me.

Rinse, repeat.

Not to put salt in your wounds now that you're in such trouble but... HOW!!!!!!!!!!? How do you manage to get into such trouble?

I run AVG and that's it.. nightly scan.. and I've never had any viruses.. your situation sounds just absurd. Could it be a mail or something that's spreading this and you've downloaded it to your fresh install as well?

[Tasan]

Did you wipe your boot sector on re-install? If not, the virus could have hid there on format and just walked back in after re-install.

[M GO BLUE!!!]

I wiped the whole thing.

Again.

All seems well now.

I even found a file that I had transferred to my PC that had been infected, but didn't do anything on the PC. Turns out that the old windows media player from 98 may be ripe for infection!