Right, I use XP on my laptop, not had any problems- not got broadband (yet- coming in the next few days), not got viruses, got AVG and ZoneAlarm installed, got messenger disabled.
However, my friend came down on saturday with his ill XP box. Some program had got onto his computer, and:
Always asked, on booting up, to connect to the internet.
Disabled Search (click search, nothing happened, eventually goes back to the start menu).
Disconnect (or shut down? Can't remember now) after downloading 400Kb
Now I thought that sounded a bit like the blaster jobbie, but he told me he'd already got and tried the MS patch, and it found nothing. Okay, so..something else/a different variant.
Sadly I went in feet first and started disabling services. What resulted was basically I disabled something that everything else depended on. Everything else (read, Installer amongst other services...installer being useful when you want to install AV software!) then stopped, giving *I think* error message 1068 a dependent service isn't running (maybe 1082 as well? 1072?) when I tried to restart in Services.
This also caused the taskbar to default to being 0 bars high, and...windows not docking on it at all (minimising would do what used to happen in W 3.1, kinda like windows itsself being a big window and everything else being a sub-window...). Contextual menus (right click) stopped working too..couldn't copy and paste between drives, windows, even within a window. Fortunately cmd still worked, and so did burning software, so I was able to trawl off all his..er..pictures.
In the end I just reinstalled over the top, and got him to get Norton...which I haven't heard if it found anything yet.
So, anyone have a diagnosis, list of services you don't f*** with, etc?
Funny thing is, I'm sposed to be looking at my boss's niece's computer too, which I have the green light to reformat. Its also giving "choose how you'd like to connect" messages on startup (plus MS error messages). Some "XXXFreeWebsite" crap has installed itsself...could anyone give me a brief overview of how these things get installed? I don't think anyone would have been going to dodgy websites with it...
Could someone give me an answer on whether viri and ad-software that Lavasoft detects are totally different, or is there a meld at some point?
My boss, for example, gets bad popups from porn sites when going to totally innocuous sites..how/how do you disable? He's got NAV 2004 and Lavasoft Ad-Aware running...what do you need to clean THAT kind of popup off? Personally I use MyIE, but he doesn't like it....
Okay so thats my longest post on here by far. I'm genuinely interested to hear full and in depth answers, as well as be pointed to dozens of links (even if it is just google with keywords!).
Cheers!


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