Some serious XP help needed...

[dick dastardly]

Was surfing around the net yesterday in work and was looking through sites for funny pictures. I found one which amongst the ususl car-in-a-ditch and head-up-an-elephants-arse pics there were some pics a bit less conservative shall we say. Anyway, this site must of had some spy-ware or something on it because the next thing I know I'm getting a Virus attack, there is a red X in my icons tray at the bottom right hand corner and my desktop is filled with about 20 additional icons linking to everything from car insurance to casinos to (lots of) p0rn.

I cliked on the little X and it sent me straight to some crappy search engine. I deleted all the icons but after a few minutes they re-appeared. I ran a pest patrol on the PC and it didn't find anything so I started hunting around the laptop to try and locate the main file myself - couldn't see it. So finally I performed a System Restore, hoping that would get rid of whatever this crap was.

Now I can't get into my laptop. Whe you tuen it on it looks like its loading up as normal but the log-in screen before getting into windows has no log-in option, it's just a large blue screen with 'Windows XP' in the middle and nothing else. I have tried all the options when you hold down F8 at the boot-up screen, from Safe Mode to Last Known Good Configration and nothing works.

Al I need is to actually get into Windows and then I'd worry about the Virus/Pest but I can't even do this. Help!

[__Lee__]

If you have a XP install/recovery disk I would go for a repair. Then download SpySweeper and run it. What sort of protection does your machine have?.

[amcdee]

If you have your original windows xp installation disk, try re-installing and do a repair installation. May seem a bit drastic but should be the trick.


Alan

[dick dastardly]

This is what me and my colleague are about to try but it warns that My Documents may be lost. If that happens it'll take me about 6 months to get back to where I was. Fingers crossed!

[__Lee__]

If thats the case then head over to Knoopix or one of the other bootable opeating systems. Knoopix is easy to use and what you could do is boot the knoopix CD which will allow you to get to your files. Copy them to somewhere safe and then do a repair.