Virus crashes explorer.exe

Viruses and worms
1

I do tech support for an online company and have recently seen an outbreak. When attempting to run cmd.exe or regedit.exe, explorer crashes and then restarts in a few seconds. Has anyone seen this or more importantly seen a scanner that will fix? Some friends of mine found a way to remove it’s registry entry that contains a random string. AVAST please help!

Thanks in advance,
DJPUCK

2

I suggest:

  1. You run a boot scan with Avast Professional Edition or Avast Home Edition (Home or Professional if your using you home computer and not business. Its Small Business if you have it on your business PC)
  2. Download Trend Micro HijackThis and select “Do a system scan and a savelog file.” then when the results show, highlight all of it, right click, select copy and go to this topic and paste the findings.
  3. Download Malwarebytes’ Antimalware and do a full scan. Report the findings in the log file before you remove them as they can be critical system files that need to be re-patched.
  4. Download Super AntiSpyware and do a full scan. If it finds anything tell us what it is or copy and paste the log file.
  5. Try downloading a replacement registry editor. I posted one but you might want a different one. Here is the download link.
  6. Send the files it finds to VirusTotal and paste the address in your next post.

You may choose to do any suggestion I said.

3

I don’t personally have this virus on any of my machines, but will do my best to gather that info the next time I run into someone who does.

4

Did you follow Donovansrb10’s suggestions, specially number 3?

5

I dont have the virus on my pc’s so no. Will do my best to have a customer do so the next time I see it.

6

This might be something similar:

http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=45732.msg384248#msg384248

As described here, it’s down to a registry key with hidden characters, a corrupted (or infected?) explorer.exe file, or some hidden BHO’s/dll’s.

http://www.techsupportforum.com/microsoft-support/windows-xp-support/196066-desktop-taskbar-disappearing-act.html

7

I don’t think so. In this case explorer starts itself again in a few seconds. It seems to only crash when launching cmd.exe and regedit.exe . Running command.exe does open command prompt but after one command ( ping localhost for example, it becomes unresponsive and needs to close.