By Leo Notenboom
Over the past weeks on my machine:
I’ve had frequent re-infections of some virus or Trojan that resets my IE home page, disables Task Manager, and blocks my access to System Restore.
Several times each day, I run AdAware, Spybot, and my virus program (Panda) to remove identified infections and spyware.
I read where disabling System Restore and then running a virus scan would clean out any virus strands that were inadvertently being backed-up with each shutdown/startup cycle.
My virus and spyware programs sometime identify Services.exe and Winlogon.exe as viruses. When this happens, these files are referenced as being in located in the C:Windowsinetdata sub-directory (which is not where they should be).
Did I royally screw things up by disabling System Restore? I understand by doing this, I erased all existing restore points so that wouldn’t surprise me.
First, let me say this…
YIKES!
You’ve got a serious infection here that some of us would technically characterize as a “mess”.
In all honesty, I’m not sure that the patient will survive.
Before we bring out the big guns, let’s run through the steps that I’d consider using to try and recover without just giving up and starting over.
Then, after all that, I’ll explain why starting over might well be the most pragmatic, safest thing to do.
Here’s how I’d proceed:
This post is excerpted with Leo’s permission from his blog.
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