[anakoluthon]

Hi,
i have a laptop running windows 98 which got infected by AntivirusGold and WareOut Scanner. I know there are other posts on them out there, but i seem to have encountered a more difficult situation:
When Windows loads, the background reads:
"Security warning
A fatal error in IE has occurred at 0028:C0011E36 in VXD VMM(01) +
00010E36. Error was caused by Trojan-Spy.HTML.Smitfraud.c

* System can not function in normal mode.
Please check you security settings.
* Scan the PC with any available antivirus / spyware remover program to fix the problem."

Naturally, this is pretty suspicious, especially since shortcuts to AntivirusGold and WareOut Scanner had "conveniently" appeared on the desktop. I don't know if anyone ran them, but now the computer is actually encountering an error - every time it starts up, it goes into an infinite loop of illegal operations. This also occurs when trying to start the computer in safe mode. The error data is as follows:
"EXPLORER caused an invalid page fault in module OLE32.DLL at 0167:7ff21a32.
Resisters:
EAX=6ac3806f CS=0167 EIP=7ff21a32 EFLGS=00010212
EBX=00000000 SS=016f ESP=0059f6b4 EBP=00000000
ECX=0059fb2c DS=016f ESI=00000001 FS=27cf
EDX=00000008 ES=016f EDI=7ff2b890 GS=1cbe
Bytes at CS:EIP:
39 02 74 03 33 c0 c3 8b 41 04 39 42 04 75 f5 8b
Stack dump:
7ff54e37 0059f6f8 0059fb2c 7ff2b890 0059f6b8
7ff501df 0059fb2c 00000001 fffeab69 0059f868
80000000 0059fb48 009b464c 009b4648 00000000
009b0000"

I don't know if that's helpful or not, but since i cannot do anything on the computer it's the only information i can give. i was going to merely format and reinstall windows, but my mother has information she needs to recover.

Is there anything i can do? Help would be greatly appreciated.