Ok going to help someone who pc is infected, running norton, xp, etc. (Norton’s 90 day is over.) PC has had no maintenance, viruses, spyware, maleware, and programs, and apps loaded with the up most care. (sarcasm)
So without reloading o/s, what do others do first. I mean disk clean temps first, (cookies, internet temps, temp, etc.) Well I guess unistall Norton very first thing. Then do you go after maleware first then viruses, or get rid of bad programs. Just wondering if the o/s ever gets to run good again after poor maintenance. I have some teenage girls, bulit a pc for them, no protection and let them have at it. Tool bars, file sharing apps, chat apps, mp3 apps, stange screen savers. Gives me a practice environment. But it seems it never runs right after cleaning. Walking it someone home, thinking I should just break down and reload!
I would go for malware first in case they have some droppers then viruses via a boot scan. Obviously remaining offline all the time and doing it in safe mode
Run some AV apps which don’t need installing, Trend Micro Sysclean and McAfee Stringer. After that, run Ad-Aware and spybot Search & Destroy. Then install avast! and do a boot time scan. Scan with Ewido and a-Squared. Clean up the registry with TuneUp Utilities. Finally a check with HijackThis! and an online scan here:
Anything unknown requires a bit of research. You can also submit the file to a multi-engine online scanner directly from the analysis, which is useful.
Persistent malware may need special removal tools. CWShredder and SmitRem are worth running in the case of spyware infection and strange screen savers.
Don’t forget to make sure all the Windows patches are in place.