I've spent the last two hours trying to fix Carly's computer because it keeps freezing. It was that or let her use the laptop all the time, and then that would end up full of viruses and trojans as well.
I ran Spyware Doctor and it found 112 errors, but an explorer page popped up and before I could click on the fix all button, the program shut down and the computer froze. I had to run it again with the Task Manager running so I could stop the programs that kept wanting to start up. The problem was in IE, and once I managed to shut that down, Spyware Doctor ran faster and was able to get rid of the nasties.
Or so I thought! The AVG antivirus popped up about 8 times finding little programs on the C: drive. One was even called Newname.exe. They were self-replicating faster than the AVG could catch them. I still had the Task Manager open so stopped them again, and (fingers crossed) they're gone.
I ran and antivirus scan after I re-booted and noticed that the four main operating system files, (kernel32.dll, wsock32.dll, user32.dll, shell32.dll) were reported with a read error so I may need to restore them. I have Spybot Search and Destroy running now to see what it comes up with.
Well, another 29 errors! And one of them was Smitfraud.C, that I had lots of problems with last year on my computer. It also found lots of entries that Spyware Doctor said it removed. Thank God for free tools. I got an email from PCTools today telling me my subscription for Spyware Doctor will expire soon and I should cough up with the dollars for the next 12 months. If the freeware Spybot Search & Destroy cleans up Carly's computer, there's no way I'll be handing any money over for the Doctor.
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