I'm running XP Home on my Gateway laptop. According to Spybot S&D I've picked up Win32.Agent vb and Virtumonde. When I try to boot up normally I keep getting black boxes opening and closing all over my screen. Using CCleaner to check startup files, I'm finding over 22,000 cmd and command files, under runonce, for all sorts of zip files. They are listed as being in my Windows/ Fonts/ ' folder. I deleted this folder (which appeared to be empty), but I still get the black boxes on startup. I can startup in Safe Mode, but I seem to be having problems running anti-malware programs. They either won't run or they run very slow. A Spybot S&D scan ran for 7 hours and had scanned only about 5,000 out of 173,000 files. Is there a way to remove the startup files (I tried doing it manually, but it will take me weeks to do this one by one), and a way to clear out the trojans? I've never run into this before, so I'm new and lost. I really don't want to format and start over if I can avoid it.
Thanks for the reply, Bob4. I'm afraid it may be a moot point. When I got home from work I turned the puter on, and noticed a ticking noise, like an old alarm clock. When I looked at the screen there was a message that no operating system was found. I checked the bios settings, and there's no master drive listed. I'm thinking the hard drive is toast. A coincidence? I pulled the hd out and stuck it in the freezer for a couple hours, but same result when I plugged it back in. Any suggestions?
Not realy.. If you have to go to extremes to get a hard drive to work chances are it will die again shortly after.
If theres important data on it that can't be lost hopefully you have it backed up else where.
If not you should take it to someone well versed in data recovery.
