I 'll try to provide more details later, but right now I have to go to bed. The computer apparently did something weird, some sort of error. On the next reboot, it was incredibly slow to start and login, and ground to a halt soon after opening avast (mouse moves, but nothing works. Oddly, the hard disk showed near-constant activity. Avast said that the starting service was disabled. I tried to start it, but apparently the malware ate one of its dependencies and took its time munching on avast during start. Anyway, I rebooted into safe mode, which started reasonably quickly. I opened avast and initiated a scan. Immediately the computer slowed to a halt, then avast errored out and speed went back up. I ran SAS, which found one instance of pup.couponbar. I downloaded and installed MBAM. It came up with about 87 instances of mywebsearch, mostly keys (been picking mywebsearch out of this thing for months). It also detected PUM.BadProxy (127.0.0.1:5-something-something-something-something) and four instances of trojan.fakeMS (Windows/notepad.exe, Windows/system32/notepad.exe, and two others listed as being notepad.exe.) Needless to say, I cannot now access notepad, so I’m opening text files in wordpad. Finally, when I turned the system off, it flashed up an error for about half a second, the first half of which was something to the effect of "WARNING: The system has to many programs open to "
Sorry for intimidating wall of text.
I’d like to get this done as fast as possible as this is the main computer- a dell studio with win vista; we have a few others in the house, but I’d prefer if we didn’t need to use them for the household: my aunt’s work laptop (not an option); my personal netbook(slow); this computer, a school macbook; and a windows xp laptop so motion sensitive that it shuts down if you touch the touchpad wrong.