Hey everyone,
I was on my girlfriends computer last night when all hell broke loose. She has an HP Mini 110. It was on a limited internet connection and only gmail worked… no other websites work at the moment. So I think this virus has been in the computer dormant and just came to life last night. Anyway, here’s the problem. An error message appeared on the screen saying that explorer.exe had a problem and to click ok to close it. Odd as I had never seen that error before. I clicked ok, and restarted the computer. The computer got hung up on the startup screen with ¨windows XP´ and the blue bar scrolling across the screen. Hung up for about 10 minutes I’d say. Finally the computer entered windows xp and the same error message about explorer.exe appeared. Now, explorer.exe will not initiate at all. Tried starting in safemode, same problem. Another service (SVP or something, can’t remember) also crashed. I am able to navigate around the computer through the task manager, but that’s it. Avast! had been deactivated. I reactivated it and tried a scan, but it is scanning at 500 bytes/sec. Tried a boot time scan… after 8 hours, the scan had only completed 1% of it’s task. It found a bunch of file errors within microsoft office and adobe but that was it. I was able to get malwarebytes on the computer with a flashdrive and it is currently scanning. After my first quck scan with malwarebytes, a PUM.HIJACK file was found and quarantined. That was the only file it found. I also installed CCleaner and I think it cleaned up a lot of file errors and problems in the registry. I am unable to intall Superantispyware because I think the virus is preventing me from doing so. It gives me an error message. But anyway, the computer is virtually useless. Even when I try to manually initialize explorer.exe it gives me the same error (00000000c0). Any ideas on what type of virus I could possibly have and what are, if any, the proper steps toward fixing it? I would just put in the windows xp disc and go from there, but its a HP Mini with no CD drive. Thanks a bunch
Orman