[ohheck]

I'm trying to clean up a heavily infested HP w/XP Home. I've taken care of all of the various trojans/worms/etc., but was still having trouble with W32/virut. In trying to clear that problem, I've managed to really mess the computer up. Now, when I start the computer, it goes all the way to the Welcome screen and then displays the Administrator logon screen. Clicking on that it says "loading" then almost immediately goes to "saving" and displays the logoff button at the bottom left. That's as far as it gets....your only choice is to shutdown or restart. When I tap f8 to go to Safe Mode, it gives you the screen with the various choices, but when choosing any of them and proceeding, it doesn't go into Safe Mode, but instead goes to the Welcome screen and does as mentioned above. I'm not very computer literate and would appreciate any suggestions. Thanks in advance.

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sounds like you borked your machine trying to fix it


You are infected with a polymorphic file infector. This infection can and will infect all the machine's executable files .exe, .scr, .rar, .zip, .htm, .html. Because there are a number of bugs in its code, it may create executable files that are corrupted beyond repair resulting in an inoperative machine.

Malware experts say that a Complete Reformat and Reinstall is the only way to clean the infection. This includes All Drives that contain .exe, .scr, .rar, .zip, .htm, .html files.

• Backup all your documents and important items only.
• DO NOT backup any executable files (,exe .scr .html or .htm)
• Do Not back up compressed files (zip/cab/rar) files that may contain .exe, .pdf, .jpg, .doc or .scr files
• Reformat and Reinstall as outlined HERE

I suggest you do the following immediately:

• Call all of your banks, credit card companies, financial institutions and inform them that you may be a victim of identity theft and to put a watch on your accounts or change all your account numbers.
• From a clean computer, change *all* your online passwords -- for email, for banks, financial accounts, PayPal, eBay, online companies, any online forums or groups you belong to.
• DO NOT change passwords or do any transactions while using the infected computer because the attacker will get the new passwords and transaction information.

[Rorschach112]

sounds like you borked your machine trying to fix it


You are infected with a polymorphic file infector. This infection can and will infect all the machine's executable files .exe, .scr, .rar, .zip, .htm, .html. Because there are a number of bugs in its code, it may create executable files that are corrupted beyond repair resulting in an inoperative machine.

Malware experts say that a Complete Reformat and Reinstall is the only way to clean the infection. This includes All Drives that contain .exe, .scr, .rar, .zip, .htm, .html files.

• Backup all your documents and important items only.
• DO NOT backup any executable files (,exe .scr .html or .htm)
• Do Not back up compressed files (zip/cab/rar) files that may contain .exe, .pdf, .jpg, .doc or .scr files
• Reformat and Reinstall as outlined HERE

I suggest you do the following immediately:

• Call all of your banks, credit card companies, financial institutions and inform them that you may be a victim of identity theft and to put a watch on your accounts or change all your account numbers.
• From a clean computer, change *all* your online passwords -- for email, for banks, financial accounts, PayPal, eBay, online companies, any online forums or groups you belong to.
• DO NOT change passwords or do any transactions while using the infected computer because the attacker will get the new passwords and transaction information.

[ohheck]

Rorschach112,
Thanks for the quick reply. I'm sure that you're correct in your assesment of my attempt to fix the computer resulting in it being borked. I should have included some further info in my post to include the following...this computer (belonging to a friend) doesn't have any recovery disks included....nor did he do any backup disk as a precaution. The recovery system is located on the D drive. When I agreed to try and get the computer running again, he said there was nothing on the computer that he wanted to retain in terms of files/etc. So, I decided to do a System Recovery. When I tried to access this function, it gave me a blue screen and fatal error message. That lead to my process of trying to clean out the malware. I tried to load a cleaner disk and the cd drive spun up, but went no further. During one of my online malware scans, I found that the cd burner file was corrupted. At any rate, now I can't get past the logon screen or even boot to Safe Mode. I have also noticed that the hard drive makes a "clicking" sound when trying to boot up. This makes me think that the hard drive is probably failing. This is the second hard drive for this machine...the first having failed during the warranty period. At this point, would it be simpler to install a new hard drive? If so, which would you suggest? Finally, would I need to buy a copy of the XP OS or could I use the recovery disks from another XP (Sony Vaio) to install on the new hard drive? As you can tell, my knowledge is limited, but I do enjoy trying to do the fix....so far with no success. Thanks again for the response.