[rev 766]

my girlfriend has an hp laptop. it's a bit old, her parents kind of handed it down. it's running xp, and has norton antivirus, which i don't condone.

the computer has a 40gig HD which for her schoolwork should be plenty. but...

lately if you leave the computer on for a day or so the free space goes from about 3gigs to about 12megs. i will run ccleaner and the windows cleaner and reboot and the freespace will be back up to 2 or 3gigs. a little while later it's saying there is not enough memory to run live update. i even took all of her and her family's documents and stored them on my external HD to free up space. when i did that and rebooted, the space went up to 7gigs, but that was 3 weeks ago, and it hasn't topped 4 since then.

there are 2 issues i am wondering/concerned about.

1-the other day we got norton to scan and it found a trojan. this seems to me like an explanation, but after the supposed disinfection of the virus it is still having the same problem. how the [bleep] can i get the thing off of there if this is the problem and norton sucks?

2-the recycle bin is the "norton protected" recycle bin. basically, anytime you delete anything it seems to save it for a while. if you leave the computer sitting for a day or so, without touching it, all of a sudden there are 1500 protected files in there. i think that must be as high as it goes. if it's a trojan, why the [bleep] is it downloading files and deleting them?


i found this site because i was trying to find a file ccleaner was trying to clean up which the computer claims never existed. i went down the file path and found some a couple files that seemed questionable. the first was dcbc2a71-70d8-4dan-ehr8-e0d61dea3fdf.ini and the second was gdipfontcachev1.dat . for some reason, the dat file has a media player icon.

i did a search for the first one, the ini file and found this thread

right now i have the laptop disconnected from the internet. if anyone can help me out with this i would really appreciate it. i thought about just following the directions from the other thread, but i'm assuming that would not work since it is a different set of files.

Edited by rev 766, 06 June 2008 - 09:50 PM.