PC thing

The last nasty adware I had required several passes of SpyBot to get rid of it. It had to be OFF the net as well. Usually you can physically unplug the network cable or turn off the wifi. Rebooting and letting Spybot run immediately was required to end the replication of the bug.

+1.
 
The viruses today are self resurrecting, you can't just kill them. You have to go into start up mode and makes sure restore point is off, etc... They are a real PITA to get rid of, that is why it is sometimes best to just back up your data, reformat then reinstall. Some PC don't come with the back-up CDs but they have a program that will make them for you, see if you have that. I had to do that with the wifes laptop.

If you are knowledgable and bold, you can manually go through the registry and weed out all of the offending program (works about 90% of the time) by doing a keyword search of all keys and values with the name of the offending file. If this is an option for you, I can give instructions for it. The risk is that there is a chance of doing more harm than good.
 
If this is still an issue, I've had an extremely high rate of success with "Malware bytes Anti-Malware" which seems to be a newer one on the scene.

http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php

Otherwise, Spybot, Ad-Aware, and HijackThis are oldies but goodies, and all worth attempting.

If you have access to another PC with known, up-to-date AV (in my opinion, F-Secure is one of the best. 30 day free trial. f-secure.com)

Pull the hard drive from the offending PC, and install it as a "slave" in the "clean" PC. Then boot up, and use the good AV program to scan the bad drive. scanning in this fashon works because the programs (virus) on the bad drive never get a chance to run, and therfore can't get into the memory, and set up their own defences. Once I do the scan this way, I typically re-install the hard drive in the other PC, and run spy-bot in safe mode, on each individual profile. (hopefully you only have one "user" on that PC. that will simplify this significantly. although remember, when you boot in safe mode, you'll also have an "administrator" option.)

Clear as mud? Great! Yes, I used to do this for a living. Now I fix phones. much easier. Our new IP phones however, have the ability to execute XML code. this scares me.
 
I think I'm gonna bring it to Carlisle, and we (you guys) can mess with it while we're drinking... :D

:D -J
 
Worst case, shotguns are still cheaper than HPs are. Unless there's something you NEED to retrieve off the HP....I think you know where this is going. (Just save the HDD just in case.) :D
 
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