[jss10]

Hi. I'll try to make this as brief, yet complete, as possible. Basically, I was randomly surfing the web, when all of the sudden my computer came under seige by something claiming to be "XP 2012 Security" or something like that. I knew it looked very fishy, and my computer became unusable -- it wouldn't let me go to ANY websites. Finally, Ad Aware picked up the threat and said that it had cleaned it, and that I should restart my computer to get rid of all traces of the threat.

I did, and when I restarted the XP 2012 thing appeared to be gone, and I do have LIMITED use of the Internet (which is how I'm able to post this message now). However, two very serious problems remain:

1. There is still some browser redirection. That is, I'll click on a Google result, for example, to go to a certain page/site, but it will take me somewhere else instead (often with "sponsored results" at the top).

2. Even worse -- whenever I try to open any program, a box pops up asking me to chose the program I want to use to open the file, and none of the options make sense, meaning that I can't open any programs. That's even true if I try to open up a second IE window by clicking on the icon in my taskbar. When I click in my Microsoft Word icon, it says "Application not found." However, if I go to my recently opened documents and open up a MS Word document, Word will, in fact, open up with the document (so I can open up a certain document in Word, but can't open Word directly).

So, obviously something's pretty drastically wrong here. Is this something that you guys might know how to fix? Please let me know. Thank you!

Edited by jss10, 28 July 2011 - 07:52 PM.