Dianne wrote;
> Why didnt AVG pick them up in the first place?

Anti Virus programs are at best better than nothing however, not one program
will pick up all of the infections that may be received. On the other hand
one can't spend mega bucks to install every one of them either.

There are some safeguards one can do to prevent most infections. On the
surface a good reliable Anti Virus program coupled with a reliable firewall
that will filter out spam, popups and malicious files helps. Spyware
programs are a good bet too. Today the manufacture of Trojans and malicious
scripts is getting worse. It takes a matter of hours for such companies like
Symantec to come up with a block where as in the old days it took weeks. In
any case it sounds like you're system is trashed by a plethora of
infections.

In my experience I have tried to shut the back door so I run stealth on the
net. You may go to this site and download the "Three Musketeers" and run
them. http://grc.com/default.htm Run these after you get your system clean
and running right. Then install a good virus protection suite like Avast. I
use the professional version because I feel it does a good job of keeping my
system clean. In conjunction with Zone Alarm Professional and Ad Aware
Professional my system seems to run nicely providing I keep up with the
current patches and such which I allow to be done automatically.

Several people have given some sound advice to help rid your system of
infections. For the most part the advice is right on. I would not roll back
the system because that will still leave you with the corruption. You may
rid the system of the Trojan or virus however; they are designed to take
over the system. They are executables that will disable firewalls anti virus
programs and anything else so it can replicate itself. If you can, run the
anti virus programs in the safe mode. If this fails run it as a boot up
scan. Providing the program has that capability. Avast Pro can be set to run
a boot up scan. In this mode it scans the drive before anything critical
loads. The bad guys can't load and take over which is a good thing.

It may be to the point your system is too far gone to perform any of the
suggestions given here on the list. The last resort would be to scrub the
drive including the MFT. Investigating and implementing some of the
precautions can help provide a more stable computing experience in the
future.

Sincerely,

Frank Suszka
netTek Computers
[log in to unmask]




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Tested on: 11/4/2005 8:58:32 PM
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