system
12
It appears as though I was simply impatient. ComboFix was not stalled, but continued to run. It produced the message about Avast anti-virus not being properly turned off, it produced a message about creating a new restore point for about 10 minutes, and it produced messages about doing a file scan for about 30 minutes. It then produced messages about deleting files and folders, and went into a re-boot process. This took close to 2 hours in total I would say. After re-booting, it spent about 10 minutes writing the ComboFix.txt file (attached). Theneverything seemed to be fine except I needed to re-enable UAC. I did that, and then re-booted one more time to have it take effect.
I have control of the security settings again and have re-enabled virus protection in Avast. I currently have Defender turned off. I ditched Java and hope I can live without it since I understand it can be a security concern. I am still using IE8 because later versions of IE don’t work well with a Favorites index I’ve built up.
Do you have any advice about using Avast on its own as a means of providing protection against malware attacks in the future?
Also, should I go ahead and remove aswmbr.exe, OTL.exe, FRST64.exe and ComboFix.exe? What about Malwarebytes?
Thanks for all your help with this! My computer is running much better.
Jon