Hi Al — What the Tech Forum Archive

And thanks for introducing your other life in music.

As Paws has already recommended, head over to Infections Removal.

An "intuitive note" may help make sense of why you might benefit from some expert hands-on assistance.
There are hundreds of thousands of files involved with the performance of any computer these days.
And millions of lines of code.

When the bad-guys try to mess with your machine, they may inject additional code to do their dirty work.
Windows and other operating systems diligently index those files and codes, even giving "size of file" and "date created" and "date last modified", "type" of file, and often attribution of source.

Commercial automated AntiVirus products like your McAfee are designed to notice if anything has "recently" been changed on your machine, particularly in areas of your machine that are known to be used by bad-guys to cause problems.

One trivial method used by bad-guys to avoid detection, is to change the date of the injected file to some date outside of the date-range that would be detected as a "recent change". If a file appears to have been in place for a long time, or if it is indexed at a date that hasn't occurred yet, the bad-guy hopes that automated security tools (like McAfee) will not notice/ignore it.

Fortunately, bad-guys often make mistakes or take short-cuts in writing their code. "Date discrepancies" may make another feature of your operating system "stand-out-like-a-sore-thumb" to you the user, even while effectively "hiding" from automated detection utilities that are looking for "recent changes".

Your date-discrepancy and browsing difficulties suggest something like the above may have occurred.

Our Malware Team is constantly studying the tactics of infection, and use their accumulated knowledge, expertise and additional specialized tools to identify and remove malicious code that may have slipped by the computer user's standard automated security tools.

WTT has good reason to be proud of our Malware Team.