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virus/trojan or some such *&*&^

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strapping young lad:
yes kerio is very very good at it imho, windows stf firewall is not

remember avg is only as good as the creator wants something free to be, you get what you pay for.

Hightower:
Dave,

I had the same problem a while back.  The only free online scan that would load was the one from Trend http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

This picked summat up and started the PC on it's way to recovery.  You will need to remove and then reinstall your firewall and antivrus stuff as part of fixing this problem.

Evilgoat:
You shouldnt rely on on-line virus scans, there are some things they just cant do.

And because its free it doesnt mean its no good. We are working on AV software at work right now and against a scan of 1900 Known virusess AVG outperformed two of the major players but about 100 hits.

As Dtalas says, flakiness and issues with the boot sector are more commonly issues with the drive nowadays. Its still possibly a virus issue but not likely. Also anything replacing the MBR on a Windows XP system will tend to kill it.

Its possible that you have more than one issue here, our record whislt working for Novatech was 130 different issues with Virii and Scumware.

Run Spybot SD and update it THEN scan
Same with Ad-Aware
Same with AVG

go to start and click run. then type msconfig. Look through the startup section for things that just look plain wrong. Anything you arent sure about google for or leave alone.

Its possible the two files that windows uses to create the profile for your user has been toasted. In this case if you havent set a password, reboot the machine in safe mode, login as administrator and create a new limited account. If you did set an Admin password press CTRL+ALT+DEL at the welcome screen and login as administrator and do the same.

If you decide to nuke the machine then do it properly. Back up only what you need, no programs. Make sure you get your favourites and any eamil (normally missed) Wipe the disk and remove the partition. Boot from a dos disk with Fdisk and take out everything and then reboot, then do fdisk /mbr. Then Re-Install XP. Make sure you are behind a firewall and do all the updates, it'll take about 4/5 reboots depending on your version of XP. Then put your anti-spyware stuff on and anti-virus and only then start moving stuff back over.

If you have it or can spare the money, get everything bang on excluding your software and data. Create any users and then use Norton Ghost to make a recovery image. This will stoip you needing to do this again, you'll only need to do the updates.

User security in XP is pants. Technically you should make everyone a limited user but in reality the restrictions on XP are draconian. You can edit the permissions a little but this doesnt help an awful lot. XP is a Home OS and was never designed to be secure, if you want the user levels go for 2k or 2K3

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