Suspect HD infected - help please!

[grahambell]

Just been having an unwanted file deleting session and discovered a problem among the temporary IE5 files.

Never had this before, but one of the folders has a sub-folder whose identity is a bold vertical bar and a lower case g (Ig as best I can reproduce it).

Can't delete either main folder or sub-folder manually, though could empty main folder of everything apart from sub-folder. Just get 'cannot delete file, file system error (1026)

This thing shows as 3.5 Mb and any attempt to click on it in Windows Explorer seems to bring up the dial-up window to conect to the Internet (yes, I'm still on dial-up!) so it seems pretty malicious to me.

Tried scan with Norton AV - nothing.

Also have another worrying file that's an index.dat showing that I haven't seen before and which is coming up as 'access denied' when I try and do anything with it.

So any ideas what it is and what I can do about it? (in simple terms for IT numpty please)

Thanks.

[peter hh]

If you anti virus isnt bringing up anything than you MITE be ok!

you can either unistall ie from the windows components then reinstall it from the windows site or get firefox.

or you can get a unistaller which basicly will remove it even tho your computer wont like it!

[grahambell]

Thanks Peter.

Don't know if this is relevant, but everytime I switch the PC on the dial-up box pops up. Thought it might be Norton System Works trying to do an update as I seem to have had similar with Norton before, but when I switched computer on just now it took loads of 'cancels' before I managed to stop the box appearing.

Any more ideas gratefully recieved.

[sp60]

www.acesoft.net/delete_index.dat_files.htm
www.milincorporated.com/a_indexdat.html

Try clearing out your history and cache in ie and see if that gets rid of these files.
If you want to manually delete them, boot windows into safe mode, that should let you do it.
BTW, please ensure it is safe to do this beforehand. I have done no research other than the above links into what these files are and the consequences of deleting them!


james.

[grahambell]

Tried clearing out the history but that hasn't worked, so how do I start my computer in safe mode so I can try and get rid of it that way?

Thanks.