Hope someone can help me with this. A friend of mine is running Avast on a VERY old Windows 95 system. The program is fully updated and has returned a positive during a recent scan. Details are: Win32:Adan-087 (adw) located in “C:\ProgramFiles\CommonFiles\CME11\CMESys.exe”.
The recommendation is to move it to quarantine but Avast is unable to complete that action and neither can it perform a repair.
She is not very computer literate and I am not knowledgeable enough to attempt removal without some detailed and informed instructions and I haven’t been able to find any advice or information on this.
Can anyone suggest what she can do in these circumstances?
I think the better will be booting with a DOS floopy, go to that folder, copy (backup) the CMESys.exe file to another floppy (if it is too big, to another folder into the HDD), delete this file and try to boot again. If boot fails, let us know.
Decided to investigate the actual file location which Avast had indicated. The information I gathered on that made me decide to concentrate on eliminating that actual program itself if possible. It wasn’t showing in Add/Remove Programs and there was no uninstall option, of course.
This infected computer is so old I could not even run Hijackthis on it or any other malware removal programs. Kept getting messages of missing .dll files. In the end I ran Avast over the program file and allowed it to detect the problem again and chose “delete”. It also gave the option to “delete on boot if necessary” and I chose that option too.
Thank God - and fingers crossed - it seems to have worked and the program was no longer present on reboot and a subsequent scan failed to detect it again. It may reappear because the connection is with Gator/Gain and there is a lot of rubbish on that old system that would take hours of intervention to get rid of but I am satisfied that for now the immediate threat is dealt with, thanks to Avast.
If it’s Gator/Gain & it reappears, try the “Gator Adware