I spoke a little to soon… While trying multiple scans over the weekend, still hunting for the source all those ‘svchost.exe’ hogging my CPU, I found when I woke up yesterday morning I couldn’t boot up. It would get hung up with a black screen and blinking cursor just after the Dell splash screen came up (by the way I’m using a Dell Mini 1012 with XP). I couldn’t even get to safe mode–only the setup menu. So I tried win2flash with a USB drive and was able to boot up once, and I backed up/exported settings and files–everything I could just to be safe. I had decided at that point I should just try to reinstall windows, but I could not because windows couldn’t find my hard drive! After many more attempts at trying different things, I finally had some success with win2flash. From the win2flash formatted USB drive, I got to the menu at bootup and chose the debug partition option (the first one). Although it seemed to freeze halfway through, when I rebooted and chose the same debug option again, it resumed windows to my surprise and began carrying out my chkdsk /f request from the day before! The next time I rebooted (still using win2flash debug option on the USB drive) I was able to see my desktop. I was so damned happy, yet nervous about having to reboot again in order to repair the master boot record… until I remembered reading in this forum that there was a way to repair the MBR using aswMBR without rebooting to Recovery Console. So I went into aswMBR, hit the scan and then hit the fixMBR button (log attached) and it seemed to work as I can now reboot normally. However, before I dance in the streets I’d like to make sure I’m totally clean (just did a malwarebytes scan, log attached, and came up clean). I’m still seeing some rogue ‘svchost.exe’ processes in my task manager (see attached jpg), but they’re not hogging my CPU like last week. I also ran TDSSKiller again (Dom, this caught a rootkit infection last week–that was why I thought I had cleaned it…but I guess it either hadn’t fully cleaned me, or the damage had already been done.) Am I out of the woods yet? I appreciate your help!