I usually handle viruses, rootkits, anything I can happen to catch (or my friends catch on theirs), but this one has me stumped. I could just be not trying hard enough, but anyway:
Started with slowdowns, and me noticing that SVCHOST, one of the many in the Task Manager, would frequently, VERY frequently, be taking up exactly 25% of my CPU usage. I'd end it, and the related service (Almost always NLA), and I'd usually be fine for quite some time, having it pop up again maybe in a few hours, sometimes not at all. This however made me suspicious, so scanning I went. Avast boot scan found a few things that it could not handle, eventually leading to me having to skip them to continue (sadly at the time I did not record what those were, but I believe they were in System Restore). Upon reboot, I ended the svchost process, ran Rkill to make sure (didn't find any if I remember), then ran a full scan in Avast, and again in Mbam. Mbam found a few things, asking to restart to remove. I did, and it never seemed to get to remove them. Always showed up again on the next scan. Avast found a few things, but I knew them to be false positives as I'd created those few programs myself, just messing around. Deleted anyway, as they didn't have any real use. Avast then found nothing.
A few days passed, with little work done in the way of removing whatever it was (Busy, lazy, take your pick), then, after one Windows Update restart, things seemed a bit different. SVChost seemed to be a bit more docile about it running at 25% usage (although still did/does), and now, upon opening Task Manager, RIGHT after opening, my CPU usage is almost always above 30%, then immediately hops down to normal idle speed (0%-1%). I'd simply been refusing it network access at all past this point (actually, pretty much after I suspected it). I had just been playing games, and running scans while I slept, as scanning 2 TB for viruses and having it unpack every zip with Heuristics on HIGH takes quite some time. Every night this week and last, I've ran a slightly different scan than last nights, with no luck. Yesterday, I used TDSS Killer, and it consistently finds an infection in SPTD.SYS, which I obviously can't seriously quarantine or delete.
Truthfully, I'm a bit ashamed, as the real "kick in the butt" that made me post and actually try a bit harder was the fact that now, it seems to be affecting my gaming. It refuses to do almost anything smoothly now, and I have PLENTY of power to do what I'm asking -
CPU: Q9650 775 Cpu, Quad
Video Card: GTS 250-60, can’t remember at the moment specifically
and a TON of Hard drives and partitions (4 or 5, each averages 2-3 partitions)
6.0 gb RAM
So please, if anyone has any insight, let me know. I'm completely under the control of this thing, and I can't get out from under it.
OH, also, I ran combofix (changing it’s name to make sure nothing happens), but I wasn’t watching it intently, so I have only a log I’d be happy to attach, and will try after I’m done typing this. Also keep in mind that I have updated everything before every scan (Mbam, Avast!), and only performed full scans with each.
EDIT: Oh sorry, forgot to mention WIndows 7, x64
EDIT EDIT: Just ran a check with aswMBR, here is the log for that as well.
No, Avast hasn’t come up with anything at all recently, which is mildly worrysome, as I KNOW I have false positive programs on here (made by myself to make sure they were really truly clean, just to test the “false positive” and Behavior Monitoring that Avast uses) and it hasn’t seen them as of late, even after clearing them from the whitelist.