virus / windows problems
 

a friend who is out of town is having laptop problems. (win XP pro)

a couple days ago it was having major pop up problems. those fake virus program ones. she downloaded, updated, and ran malwarebytes in safemode and it found a few things.

but now booting into normal mode it just freezes after 30 secs. right after a popup comes up that says "you might be at risk because your firewall is turned off"

but when she boots into safemode the firewall is turned on. so it must be another fake aleart. she also can not click on the setting that says "change how windows alerts me". (maybe this is normal in safe mode though?...)

running malwarebytes and smitfraudfix finds nothing now.


my next step if it was my PC would be to sick the XP cd in and reinstall windows overtop. but she is out of town with no CD and needs it to work where she is.

what else can we try / run?

maybe try turning some stuff off in msconfig?

is system restore an option or is that likly messed up by the viruses?

thanks.

system restore mite work

try scanning with a virus scan

Boot from the winxp disc, go into recovery console and do chkdsk /f. This should fix any boot issues, etc...

I've had that before, it's not a virus per say, but mroe like a rogue program problem.

Malwarebytes will only do so much, your friend need to run malwarebytes, then open up taskmanager and kill off a bogus explorer1(or similar).exe, go to the system folder and do the same, and run malwarebytes again to reboot.

Your friend also need to fix the internet explorer directive, and change the redirection or something that keeps her from getting to google, and redirect her to rogue program sites.

I can't remember the exact folder name/procedures as it happened at the beginning of this year, but you can probably google it.

malwarebyes
avg
superantispyware

you dont want to hear the mess i went thru to get rid of "reader_s.exe"

my opinion would b a complete reinstall, using a good antivirus/malware etc. (i.e. nod32, kaspersky), and using common sense to avoid a situation like this again

i've never really been able to completely remove all traces of virus/malware using a myriad of tools. they usually cripple ur windows installation and using recovery console doesn't work 100% of the time