My Introduction And Problem

Hello, I found this forum by Googling HiJackThis, and liked the idea of possibly being allowed to learn, especially since gaining support for these problems becomes increasingly lengthy. The bad guys are just getting too good, and there doesn't seem to be enough hours in a day for the good guys to help everyone being infected. At this time, I am attempting to gain help in cleaning a Windows XP Home Edition laptop. My 4 year old daughter plays games on this laptop when her daddy is at work, or used to. Most of the CD's will no longer run, and I suspect the garbage is the reason since files that used to be there seem to have disappeared, for example something called shell.dll . Unfortunately, my husband insists on using the laptop in combination with his desktop to play an on-line game with 2 characters at once, and/or too look something up on the web concerning the game without actually having to log out of the game completely. As long as the garbage doesn't interfere with his game, he could care less about its issues. This also further complicates my cleaning process since anything I do is undone once he comes home, and help can no longer be gotten within a few hours as used to be the case. The issues are specifically a homepage hijacking, with about:blank in the address bar and all links being directed to www.v61.com; unwanted pop-ups; the possible compromise of Norton's AV; and the afore mentioned lack of being able to run my daughters preschool games. Thank you for reading. I look forward to hanging around and hopefully learning.

Well, I'm learning already. I opened notepad, and copied the HJT entries I believed should be removed, planning to bounce it off whatever instructions I'm given. When I attempted to save the file on this desktop computer, McAfee picked it up as being a virus. The infected laptop, runs Norton, so does that mean Norton has been compromised?

Hi! Your AV is most likely reacting to one of the URL’s in the log file and is because of that alarming you. Feel free to post your HJT log in the forums and we will try to help you on what items that should be removed.