I’m not very knowledgeable about computers and viruses, so help is very appreciated. I placed this in the virus section because I suspect that I am having problems because of a virus, but please tell me if this belongs in another forum.
Two days or so ago, I found that I was having trouble getting my Windows XP computer to load. I would get to login, but a couple minutes or so later, my computer was unable to load all of the files for the user. It would load up fine before then, but then the computer would just stop doing it. I could move my mouse, but clicking on the icons on the desktop had no effect, the toolbar at the bottom was not completely loaded, I could not press the start button, and putting the mouse over the start button caused the hourglass sign to appear on my mouse. Also, the task manager did not come up whenever I pressed ctrl + alt + del. I tried shutting down the computer by pressing on the power button and booting it back up several times to no effect. I also tried going on different logins, but they had the same problem.
Eventually, I learned how to go into safe mode through my research on another computer. I went on it and tried deleting recently added programs and delaying tasks that were scheduled to start when my computer started up (I thought that it might not be a virus problem at that time), but that had no effect. Eventually, I opened avast and did a “thorough” scan of my computer, which said that I had no viruses, though many of my files were decompression bombs (but those had shown up before and I was sure that they were not viruses). I deleted the decompression bombs anyway. Then, I went to the log viewer and discovered that about the time when this disaster started, there was a warning that signs of Win32: Rootkit-gen had been found in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\NTDLL.DLL. However, I did not get a notification of it being deleted or anything like that. I scanned the file with avast again, but no virus alerts appeared. I also found that my virus chest could not be accessed because “Virus Chest server is not running. RPC communication failed.” Additionally, my resident scanner was disabled, and even when I turned it back up to high, it was disabled again when I restarted the computer. Moreover, I found that when I clicked the button to change the resident scanner level, even when I had set it to high previously (and the user interface indicated that it was on high), it was switched to disabled again. I tried repairing avast but that did not do any good.
I suspect that my problems have something to do with that virus, though it is possible that they are separate issues. I need my computer for school, and the computer I am on right now is for someone else in my family, so I need this issue resolved in a limited amount of time. Please reply quickly with ways to solve my computer problems.