Problem with PC.

[groucho]

My mate has just got his PC and is running WinXP. He has a couple of problems with it that started with a program that's running in his system tray. It looks like a small globe with the windows motif flashing on and off. It has a pop-up warning that says "Your computer is infected, click here, blah, blah, blah.

You cannot right click this icon to find out info about it and if you click it it just opens an empty IE browser.

He has some weird things that happen on boot-up as well. The C://Windows/System32 folder initialises and shows itself and he gets muliple windows open (mainly anti virus/spyware programs).

I stopped a few of the pop-ups by uninstalling the programs but Norton Internet Security would not allow me to uninstall it, it said that I didn't have the right priviledges. It's only a home PC.

Any ideas guys.

Cheers.

[ultimasimon]

Sounds like its well and truly infected

I would try and find a boot virus checker, reboot into 'dos' and run a full check from there before you enter windows. If you cant do that, then I would take the hard drive out, and install it into another pc as a slave drive, and scan it with AVG Pro (or free).

Do make sure that all your viri defs are upto date before you add the new disk to the second pc. Then scan the disk and see what it finds.

Personally I don't rate Norton or the others as much as I do AVG once a pc is infected; in my previous experience Norton just locks everything up and you cannot do anything.

[mattley]

ultimasimon said:

Sounds like its well and truly infected

seconded.

So well and truly that a rebuild is the only option.

[bigdods]

AVG will do it. Had a friend dump a pc on me the other day - ' I dont know why but its so slow I cant use it'

Booted it up, loaded AVG and Adaware onto it from a memory stick and hey presto 34 viruses, 102 trojans and >200 malwares

All cleaned off, PC now running like a dream :-)

[groucho]

Thanks guys. I thought it was nasty. He's only been onling a few times, where he got the infection from, who knows?

[sybaseian]

groucho said:

Thanks guys. I thought it was nasty. He's only been onling a few times, where he got the infection from, who knows?

porn site?????

[SlidingSideways]

bigdods said:

AVG will do it. Had a friend dump a pc on me the other day - ' I dont know why but its so slow I cant use it' Booted it up, loaded AVG and Adaware onto it from a memory stick and hey presto 34 viruses, 102 trojans and >200 malwares All cleaned off, PC now running like a dream :-)

And the one's that AVG and AdAware missed?
TBH, if I saw a machine that messed up, I'd not completely trust it until I'd reformatted and rebuilt it from scratch.
Just my personal opinion.

"I say we nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure".

[aranell]

groucho said:

Thanks guys. I thought it was nasty. He's only been onling a few times, where he got the infection from, who knows?

There are some really nice virii and things which just require a connection to the Internet to infect your PC(IE doesn't even need to be open). If you do rebuild, the first thing to do is fully patch the machine as a lot of these virii can only infect machines which aren't fully patched.

[groucho]

Sounds like he'll have to have it professionally seen to.