Good and you're most welcome!Thanks, Dakeyras! I've run all as instructed.
Fair play and by all means I will answer it.I do have one question...
Understandable, you have to bare in mind not all malware will actually exhibit obvious symptoms compared to say the more robust and intrusive types.I guess I don't have that usual "yep, it's definitely gone!" feeling. Along that vein, I'm just looking for some more info to help put my mind at ease.
Firstly there was no evidence of a key-logger I could discern and I suspect the fact your Facebook account was hacked is just one of those things as social networking sites are from secure in my humble opinion and this is more down to the vendors themselves than anything else per say. Plus trolls that regularly surf such sites are quite devious and often deploy what is known as a brute force approach taking into account what information may be posted and just get lucky gaining access for example.what was it that had infected my machine, and which fix was it that seems to have put a stop to it? I've dealt with a few different infections in the past, but this one's unique to me in that it hasn't explicitly prevented me from doing anything, like logging in or accessing my normal homepage.
As long as you change the both the password and secret question on a regular basis all should be fine.
The host file in use was compromised as in a malicous entry was added, this we successfully addressed along with the a malicious proxy server entry. Both could have been added because of the outdated Java installation that was installed for example. Finally some installers you had downloaded in the past were bundled with third party adware related dross and those have been dealt with also.
Overall in the great scheme of things your machine was far from being either badly infected and or compromised and addressing all was relativity easy from my point of view.