Yesterday I received an email from a friend asking if I could play an mp3 that his computer had disabled. It was Rex Hunt going off at a cricket match and it played perfectly. I zipped it up and returned it by email to my friend.
Later, when I was in Firefox, I noticed that YouTube videos were taking an extraordinarily long time to load, as did web pages. I fired up System Explorer, a brilliant program for information about Tasks, Processes, Startups, IE Addons, Uninstallers, Windows, Services, Drivers, Connections and Opened Files, to check what I had running that shouldn't have been. System Explorer lets you check running files online at Virus Total to analyse them, and I found a file called svghost.exe that got the thumbs down from 11 of the 33 virus checkers they use.
Removing it was quite easy, just stop the process and delete the file. While searching for the file I came across a couple of other suspicious looking file called msupdte.exe and 17PHolmes1749.exe. I searched online for references to them and discovered they were associated with a rootkit virus, and the site recommended downloading a little program called SDFix to check system files in safe mode, which I did, and after a couple of hours of running various virus and trojan checkers I got a clean computer again.
Videos still wouldn't work though and I read that using MS Update would solve the problem, and after updating it did. Everything is now back to normal.
I'm running Spyware Doctor with built-in anti-virus on it's own now after AVG8 warned me about installing it with another anti-virus program installed. I should have ignored the warning and ran them both, because looks like the "Doc" missed this one.
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