23rd July 2010, 4:50 PM
That was the problem, everything the antivirus programs could actually find, they'd removed... so I had no idea what was still there.
So I managed to download, via download.cnet.com because the program's official site was of course blocked by the virus, Malwarebytes' anti-malware program... and it actually found what appears to have been the virus messing up the internet! Hopefully I'm finally virus-free... it's been like three weeks now (or a little more, maybe a month?), and it's been a huge pain. Tried a bunch of different things, some of which found some things, but never all of the infection... wish I'd heard of this one before, that actually found what was left. :)
The honorable mention would go to AVG's free rescue CD, because the most bothersome virus was one of those stupid fake antivirus ones, which pretty much made running anything on the computer impossible for a day or two before I burned the rescue CD on my other computer and ran a full scan. That scan got rid of that, and at least one other thing too, making the computer usable again... but missed several other things. Another AVG scan several days later found another thing, and then there was this other file that took a while to get rid of, but that and Avira (which I managed to get installed, despite attempts of course to not let me download it) didn't find this trojan that the Malwarebytes program did...
Where did it come from? Who knows, it's so easy to get infected these days, I don't think it even takes clicking on anything anymore, with properly infected web pages... it is annoying that Symantec Antivirus, which I did have running, did nothing to stop it from getting in, though. Oh well. (Yes, I've gotten rid of that. Hopefully I can find something that will work better... or AVG at least, that seems to be decent if not perfect and is free.)
Finally managed to run Windows Update for the first time in a month. :)
So I managed to download, via download.cnet.com because the program's official site was of course blocked by the virus, Malwarebytes' anti-malware program... and it actually found what appears to have been the virus messing up the internet! Hopefully I'm finally virus-free... it's been like three weeks now (or a little more, maybe a month?), and it's been a huge pain. Tried a bunch of different things, some of which found some things, but never all of the infection... wish I'd heard of this one before, that actually found what was left. :)
The honorable mention would go to AVG's free rescue CD, because the most bothersome virus was one of those stupid fake antivirus ones, which pretty much made running anything on the computer impossible for a day or two before I burned the rescue CD on my other computer and ran a full scan. That scan got rid of that, and at least one other thing too, making the computer usable again... but missed several other things. Another AVG scan several days later found another thing, and then there was this other file that took a while to get rid of, but that and Avira (which I managed to get installed, despite attempts of course to not let me download it) didn't find this trojan that the Malwarebytes program did...
Where did it come from? Who knows, it's so easy to get infected these days, I don't think it even takes clicking on anything anymore, with properly infected web pages... it is annoying that Symantec Antivirus, which I did have running, did nothing to stop it from getting in, though. Oh well. (Yes, I've gotten rid of that. Hopefully I can find something that will work better... or AVG at least, that seems to be decent if not perfect and is free.)
Finally managed to run Windows Update for the first time in a month. :)