I scanned because some Explorer pages were randomly opening wholly black-screen, and the system was slow. Avast said I had 1 decompression bomb and 2 other serious threats, the names of which I can’t recall, and when I couldn’t send them to the chest I ran a reboot scan which automatically does so.
After that scan I tried to open Explorer. No dice. Tried to open Avast - no dice. My system says Avast is turned off and I can’t turn it on. I can’t system restore because it says the files aren’t stored where they should be, and obviously I can’t scan and post files because 1) Avast isn’t working, and 2) nor is Explorer (and as the laptop is under 2 weeks old I’d not got around to installing Firefox yet - not that that would probably work either.
I’m afraid there’s a problem - I’d not yet created the system restore CD. I bought a data stick, but Toshiba won’t accept those and insist on a CD for theirs, and I just hadn’t got around to it yet. I wasn’t anticipating this - never had anything this severe happen before, let alone 2 weeks in with a fully protected system. :-[
Is there anything I can do without that CD, short of getting a professional IT technician to completely restore the whole thing?
Thank you so much again - I reread the link you gave me more carefully and saw to do that, and have just started that scan; it’s at 13% now. (And thanks, too, for not pointing out my failure to notice that option. As you can probably tell, I’m not very IT savvy so the various screens are somewhat confusing.) I can’t tell you how grateful I am. Will let you know what happens next.
Ran it and it said it found damaged (might have been corrupted) files and successfully repaired them! I am running it again, as per the advised actions, and hopefully this time the outcome will be that all is well. Am crossing everything! Once again, thank you so very much. I was pretty depressed over how much fixing this might be at an IT repair shop. Not a good time for us to have unexpected bills.
Okay, I can now run Avast again, and it seems it removed (quarantined, anyway) Win32:Cycbot-KI. I googled, and it appears to be a common issue when people remove this. I still can’t run Explorer though, which is really frustrating/worrying. I’m getting the message that there is no issue anymore when I rerun the scannow prompt. Is it worth running again, do you think, just in case, or is there another fix I could have a shot at? I seem to be stuck between having no online access and having a trojan…
Please go to my site and download the file Default_EXE to your desktop
Unzip the reg file within
Right click the reg file and select merge
Accept the warnings and then try the exe files