My mom dropped off her computer the other day after I determined over the phone she must have a virus. The virus was quite cleverly written, which is why I hope there is a special place in hell for the writer. Her AVG would start then die a quick death. Going to any of the antivirus sites: Grisoft, Avast, Norton, Panda or even the antispyware sites would kill internet explorer just as quickly.

So I burned a disk full of every free tool I could find. When I loaded it into her computer I could navigate to the folder, but as soon as the program name was visible (I hadn't even clicked on the setup file yet) Windows Explorer would kill over. So I am left with no method of detecting the nasty worm. I ran a google search and came up with a number of possible worms that behave like this. One of which Panda had a removal tool for, so I ran it but it didn't detect that particular strain it was written for so I can strike one from the list. My mom says she wrote down the name of whatever AVG initially caught through a scan before it killed AVG, but I haven't been able to get a hold of her to get it from her. Naturally she didn't bring it when she dropped off the potential boat anchor.

Its looking pretty grim at this point. Without any more to go on, the next step will be a new HDD, reinstall everything, then very carefully reinstall her data. Luckily I had set up a backup program to backup on zip disks automatically, so finding the data won't be difficult, but making sure it comes across clean is.

The other hard thing to do will be finding the time to do it all.

Steve G.