Malware Removal Forums

Need help w/ Severe Virus on laptop

iceman · 2009-12-27T05:19:20+00:00

Happy Holidays everyone! So far my Holidays have been partly consumed with trying to get rid of a virus on my wife's laptop. At this point it's exceeded my bag of tricks, so I need some help. The first sign of a virus was a popup from a pseudo-antivirus program called "Internet Security 2010". It warned me about several serious infections and said I needed to buy the program to remove them. I ran a scan with my antivirus program, AVAST, and after updating the virus definitions I thought I was in the clear. However, the virus had made changes to the system, like installing wallpaper and disabling the ability to change it. Also, it disabled task manager, so I couldn't see running processes. I was able to fix these things by finding the right places in the registry and making changes using Regedit. There were also messages on bootup about not being able to load things like "notepad.dll" and "winupdate86.exe". Seeing that these were associated with the virus, I used MSCONFIG to disable the