I have a sony vaio laptop with Vista Home Premium. No MS disks came with the machine.
Friday night I was reading my email and Facebook when avast began warning me of spyware. Unfortunately, I just clicked on move to virus chest without writing down the specifics of the message. However, what I do know is that all of the several messages was warning about a temporary path that included the string “FREENOTE.exe” in them. I don’t recall ever downloading something by that name - however, there has been a windows sidebar gadget which seems to match the description of this program. It’s been sitting on the desktop for months.
There was no download going on. I don’t normally have access to the internet, and was in a restaurant that had free WiFi, reading my mail at the time. I opened no attachments. My Vista Home Premium based laptop might, however, have been attempting to do some of the automatic updates that go on with vista, avast, etc. since it had been some time since I was last online.
The file specified was in a strange path that was not like c:\temp but appeared to be pointing into some sort of avast work area.
I moved all the files that were warned into the virus chest.
As I was running out of battery, I shut down the machine and went home. On Sunday, I booted the laptop up at home to attempt to run the virus scanning software to see what if anything I needed to do.
I begin to see a variety of issues - the system freezing up, not shutting down when requested etc. I forced a power off. Not knowing what the proper procedure should be, I attempted to come up in safe mode, but was unable to get the virus scan software to run in that mode.
I shutdown again and powered up. I ran the avast scan which ran for a very long time. Eventually, I noticed that the scan had just stopped after about 22% of the machine was scanned. No changes to the number of files scanned was occurring, and no indication was shown that the scanning had stopped. I pressed the pause button and that seemed to generate a response from the program. When I pressed Stop (I planned on starting the program again) the program froze. I forced another power off, rebooted, and tried again. This time things ran longer and found the same kinds of files again. I told the scanning to move them all to the virus chest. It was still scanning when it was time to go to bed. So I left the machine scanning.
When I got up this morning, the laptop had gone into hibernate. I entered my password, and the machine responded that it could not continue because a device was disconnected.
Now I really don’t know what to do next.
I hope someone can point me to some steps to allow me to do something useful.