Vista Security: What are You Using? Vista Security Discuss Vista Security: What are You Using? in the Windows Vista forums; I tried to use a supposedly "key generator" application on a Win XP PC. I knew about the possibilities of a virus infection, but fell safe knowing that ...

[felix8406]

I tried to use a supposedly "key generator" application on a Win XP PC. I knew about the possibilities of a virus infection, but fell safe knowing that I had AOL's free Mccafee AV software installed. However, though Mccafee detected and supposedly deleted a Trojan virus, it let the virus through. The Trojan took over IE7, stop Windows from receiving any updates, turned automatic update off, kept bringing new browser windows, stopped Firefox dead in its track, slow down the PC, didn't allow any anti-spyware application to run or update its database and other issues. My first thought was to reinstall Win XP (it's dual-boot with Vista), but I just have a regular Win XP disk w/out SP2/SP3 and didn't feel like messing around with reinstalling XP and then downloading and reinstalling all the updates.

All this occurred last night. This morning I decided to try and get rid of the Trojan and was successful at it without spending any money on software that might or not work. These are the steps I took and hope you find them useful someday:

1. Downloaded (used another PC) Windows Defender and Avast Free AV and saved them to a clean USB drive. You won't want any files in the USB drive because the drive may get infected when installed to the infected PC.
2. Disconnected the PC from the Internet and disabled System Restore. The virus may get hidden in one of the restore points.
3. Uninstall Mccafee. I figured my PC was already infected, so removing Mccafee was not going to hurt the PC much. But the main reason I removed Mccafee is because installing two AV software on a system creates conflicts. When asked if I wanted to Restart the PC to complete the removal process, I selected "NO".
4. I installed Avast Free Home Edition and selected the Scan at Startup option. When the PC started, Avast began a scan of the system. These took a while to complete, but it detected and deleted five infected files.
5. When Windows started, Avast brought a warning about a Trojan virus. I tried the delete, rename and quarantine options, but the warning kept popping up. So I selected the "do nothing" option, restarted the PC and Avast completed cleaning the system. When the PC restarted, it ran normal, I was able to turn on automatic updates, IE and Firefox ran perfectly and Avast didn't detect any viruses.
6. I then installed and ran Windows Defender; it immediately detected two "critical" spy-ware, which it deleted.
7. Just in case, I downloaded and reinstalled Win XP3.

Now my PC is back to normal again...as fast as ever.