Trying to fix my sisters pc

[russbeer]

Hi all,

I have my sisters pc while they are on holiday and her kids have put all sorts of shite onto it, to the point where i can't even open IE, i get pop-ups all the time advertising this and that, and don't seem to be able to shift them with the usual spyware progs and antivirus scans.

Everytime IE is started the screen freezes and i go to task manager to kill iexplore but every time i do, it restarts iexplore itself, and takes about 30-50mb of memory when its not even on screen. I've had a look through previous problems on here and i'm trying out some suggestions there in the mean time.


Any thoughts on how to get rid whilst avoiding a full reinstall?

Thanks in advance guys and gals.

Russbeer

[grint]

Not what you wanna hear, but a full reinstall would probably be quicker and more beneficial in the long run.

Or use Firefox.

[beerman]

I'd fully reinstall. As far as I'm concerned AV products are there for alerting only, they never do a good job of removal and would you want to risk it?

Do a full reinstall, load all the apps your sister needs and then take an image with something like acronis. Will save you the hassle 3 months down the line when it happens again. Believe me when kids see "free xbox 360" pop ups they love to click them

[TotallyRandom]

yep take MY Doc's off on to a CD reinstall XP and drivers stick Good Virus software, Spybot on there and they stick there My DOC's back

[liveseytowers]

Try creating a new user account and testing it then? It might just be something installed into their local profile so a new user account could just fix it? If it does just move all the docs over and then reboot and then delete the old user account

Also try and download the IE7 executalbe if you can (I know you can do this with IE6 using a few switches) and doing a full re-install?

Or maybe removing all the shortcuts for IE and installing firefox and setting it as the default browser?

If that stuff doesn't work then a rebuild might be best.

[Breamy]

download smitfraudfix onto a memory stick/cd and run that

[Waka]

hold down F8 on boot, start in safe mode with networking and see if you can download spybot s&d.

W.

[doozeruk]

have you tried booting into safe mode to see if you can get onto the net and then download firefox and download a few different programs to sort it.

I'd hose the lot and reinstall windows as you will waste hours trying to fix it to be honest.

Although depends if she has lots of apps/pics etc she wants to keep.

There's so many anti spyware programs it's hard to know what to try.
Spyblaster/spyware terminator/a-squared free/adaware/cwshredder are all usually worth a try

[dibbler]

First thing i would try would be combofix
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/comb...o-use-combofix

[Guido]

I had major problems earlier this week that Kasperky, Spybot, Ad-aware and a couple of other programs couldn't sort. Ran the free version of Malwarebytes anti-malware software and it found 58 infected objects which it removed and I've had no problems since.

May be worth a try?

[russbeer]

thanks all, got about a dozen or so to try there. Will give em a go.