Casual problem ?!?!

Here’ s the situation. My computer has been infected by a virus that was hidden in my temporary internet files. I detected it by scanning these files with avast. I had this repaired. But now it seems that my problem is not solved yet. I am unable to open any exe. file. But strange enough i do can open internet explorer and outlook express. On the site they adviced me to download avast!virus cleaner. That’s what i did but also this program can’t be opened. Some say I have to change the name of my avast file from an exe. file to a com. file. What’s the use of that? Is that a good solution ? What do I have to do after I have been able to open Avast ? I thought i repaired this stuff, but it seemed not to help.
Please help.

Thanks very much

Hi,

what virus was this exactly ??
what Win do you use ? are all Winupdates applied ?

Seemingly, some malware changed the system settings for opening EXE-files (programs).
so even the avast CLEANER cannot be run normally, but when you rename it to .COM, .SCR or similar,
it should run, detect the system/registry changes and repair them (restore them to the default settings).

So just do it… :wink:

After a reboot, everything SHOULD run smoothly again…

Afterwards, run a thorough scan with avast (archive scanning enabled), and clean/repair/move any infections, in case there should be left any…
(see “VirusRemoval” below in my sig, also on how to secure your system & browser better…)

:wink: :wink:

I’m running windows 2000. Normally my virus scanner is updated twice a week. The hard thing is to change this exe to a com file or something else. how do i do something like that ?

open “My Computer”, navigate to the folder where you saved the cleaner to, rightclick the file and select rename
:wink:

or go Start → run
then enter
ren c:<path/folder_to_Cleaner>\aswclnr.exe c:<path/folder_to_Cleaner>\aswclnr.com
hit Return

or redownload it, and save it from within your browser as blabla.scr or whatever.cmd or clean.pif or helpme.com
etc etc etc…

or, if when opening EXE-files, you get an error message with a specific filename in it
save/overwrite the cleaner as exactly that filename, in the folder where you earlier deleted the infected file from…

Most of this is pretty well explained in the instructions for the cleaner:

http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_cleaner.html

P.S.: If you don’t succeed, doing the above in SafeMode (F8-Boot) could help, too :wink: