Okay... aside from the moronicas partying the other night, I spent Friday night and most of Saturday trying to eradicate spyware, malware, and viruses from my mom's computer. Spybot and AdAware found over 350 items when they first ran, and AVG has been popping up trojan and downloader viruses left and right. Even ran Trend Micro's new online virus and spyware scan, and it found a few more things.
Unfortunately, that wasn't enough. Something was really stuck, and I thought I finally had it licked when I put in an XP Home install CD just so I could boot from it, get to the dos prompt, and manually remove the crap that was in use in windows. At long last, there was finally success... the crap was gone.
That feeling of euphoria lasted a mere two days (since the computer wasn't used yesterday). One batch of shinola is back [img]graemlins/madhell.gif[/img]
And I can't find any way to remove it. I've told mom that if it were my PC at this point, I'd back up my important data, wipe the drive clean, and reinstall windows from scratch. And when she leaves tomorrow, that's what she claims she's planning to do (to have someone do for here, near where she lives).
However, I've got a couple of thoughts of something I may have missed, and before I resign entirely (and since I'm tired of googling tonight), I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on...
... this file (qvyaa.dat) which is the symptom of bad stuff. It and five other files reside in Windows\system32, and they come back from the dead every time I get rid of them...
... as well as the setting in Windows XP that tells it not to bring back any system files when you reboot (which may be the thing I'm missing)
... and any other thoughts on removing it. I've used Ad Aware, Spybot, HiJack This, Killbox, and I think a few other things, to no success.
Frickin' thing eliminated my chance for gaming tonight. I've got to get up at a decent hour in the morning, and it's now time to be getting to bed
Any thoughts or ideas are appreciated. Names and addresses of creators of this crap are also appreciated, so that I may return the favor in my own *special* way.... :Evilgrin: