Hello, youse helped me a few weeks ago. Crap Cleaner finally removed a malevolent site that kept jumping into my addy bar. Forum gurus suggested all sorts of good anti-malware and I installed it and am very careful about my computer now.

However, my son is not careful. He clicked on a "member profile" in AIM of one of his schoolmates, and instead of displaying her profile, it redirected him elsewhere, said something about "g00ns.com" and made his screen go blank, then put an icon on his desktop, executed a program, and basically, has ruined his computer. It can only be run in safe mode, and is so slow as to be useless. Running the various anti-virus, anti-spyware, recovery programs, etc. do nothing to remedy the problem. It won't let him do a system restore to an earlier time.

I am thinking to completely erase the whole computer, then reinstall a boughten copy of XP. I'd have to buy a copy, because his computer is a Dell and it did not come with disks. XP was already on it. He doesn't want me to erase the whole thing, as he has music and photos he likes on it, but I think it ALL should go, ground-zero time.

Do any of you brains have a thought about this idea? Thanking you in advance and of course I will donate. I also think he ought never to use AIM again.

Snowie

What model is your Dell? Since it didn't come with a XP disc, it should have a System Recovery program with everything you need to reformat in a partition.

If you wish you could post a HijackThis log for assistance. I suggest this because you may be able to save his music collection and photo collection since they themselves may not be infected, etc. Also re-ripping CD's and encoding them can take a very long time depending upon how many CD's he has, and loosing pictures can be irreplaceable.

Edit:

To quote what rridgely puts in his posts:

Thank you for your help. His Dell is a Dimension 8300.

He is unable to run IE now. His AIM is dead (good). Now, MSN Messenger is dead, too, and only Windows Msgr is sort of working. It seems to be slowly destroying everything on the machine.

I will see if he can get to those good downloads on that Locias site and run them with Firefox. He already has run some of them but doesn't have all of them on his computer.

Slightly off the given matter at hand, but how should he go about educating himself about computers so this sort of thing stops happening? The books I find at the bookstore even I can tell are already outdated. Would getting PC Magazine and so forth be a good idea? How about a college course? I don't think he ought to just play games and listen to music. He should strive for more geeky understanding but I can't help him in this. How in the world did you folks get so clever about computers? Is it a gift or can it be attained through study?

Thank you.

Signed,
Snowie. Miserable in West Texas

to get the data like music and stuff con't you buy extrenal Hard drive and copie it form the C: drive to it.

Hey twins, that's what mine is too.


Until you post a hijack this log you can also try Microsoft's Malicous Software Removal Tool in Safe Mode by letting it scan all of the hard disks he has by running this command:
Start->Run->mrt.exe /f

Also make sure he has a firewall installed, if you don't want to worry about confusing configuration settings download and install ZoneAlarm (Free)

Since I'm no expert with HijackThis logs I'll leave that to the pro's.


I can only speak for myself; I absorded tons of information by visiting tip sites, security sites, reading what Microsoft has on their support pages, and by lurking in forums such as antivirus forums, antispyware forums and soaking up what other knowlegdeable people know.

As for protecting a system to keep malware off of it you'll find even knowledgeable users have tons of security related software to keep their systems clean, this is called layered protection which in reality is the only way combat malware these days because one, or two programs isn't going to cut it, also common sense is the best tool.

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Depending upon how much he has buying a package of CD-R's, or CD-RW's may be a cheaper route.

true... but even when he is done it adds more space to a computer.

there was a report on some kind of security agency(or something like that) which claimed that IE was dangerous. in some ways that is true because of ActiveX controls self-installing themselves in the background when you browse a page. just so you know some ActiveX controls are dangerous and some are not.

if you can, go to http://www.getfirefox.com , download firefox, and if you have the ability to burn cds, then put firefox on one and install it on your son's computer.

firefox is much safer because it contains no activex support meaning that you cant get anything dangerous by browsing(however you can by downloading something), and its theme/extension support is really nice.

i personally use Avant Browser(which uses IE) because i like it more than Firefox but then again Avant has the ability to disable activex

As for AIM, it is 100% spyware free. it has small ads but they just advertise..noting more. there are also alternatives to AIM such as AIMLite or Trillian(Trillian supports up to 4 IM networks) which are completely spyware free. and if you're worried about spyware, you can find some Open Source(that means the code that the program was compiled from is available) program.

A memory stick is sometimes a handy emergency tool for taking off and storing some music or pictures. I've also used mine to take the likes of Ewido setup and updates to a friends house as they were unable to get online due to trojans.

This article may be of some use to you.

http://forums.techguy.org/t394481.html

this process should be deleted: WinZod32.exe