@#$%^ Damn Virus

Concur.

And congrats on the backup. You saved me a rant.

Them damn Russkies

What possesses them to perpetrate such perversity and depravity ?? Thay must be liberals and politically correct.





David

I would also recommend Sandboxie in the future, in order to prevent these situations: http://www.sandboxie.com/

Channeling H2O_Man this morning, Dave?

Actually, they are the complete extreme of anarchists. They are using their talents and resources to obtain the maximum benefit for themselves with the least amount of work and without regard to the rights of others.

If you running XP or Vista and have a computer kids and others used maybe going even beyond sandboxie and installing microsoft steady state might be wise.

With that any change to the system is wipe out on reboot unless you tell it otherwise. The program is free.

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There is also a nice if not free program call "process guard" that can be set to block any new program or process from running unless you ok it with a password.

It also keep programs from placing keyboard hooks unless you ok that program to do so.

Any program that had been change will not also be allow to run unless you ok it also.

Ofter memory protection and root protection ETC.

I been very happy with it for over a year and it run somewhere around 30 dollars.

I love that it ask me if the new version of my AV or Microsoft malware detector should be allow to run for example.

Nothing run unless I ok it.

I'm not sure if this will help, but recently I was told about a "System Restore" when this sort of problem (virus) hit a friend of mine and I wanted to help but couldn't. Didn't know enough so I started asking around. Seems it is not difficult to do and it certainly can't hurt. It just takes you back to before you got bitten. BUT I was told it all depends on how bad the virus is. Maybe I am just whistling in the wind.

A great many viruses either stop you from doing a system restore or are able to survive a system restore in one manner or another

This particular virus shuts down my virus protection, stops my firewall from loading and stops any system restore. I booted in safe mode, ran the virus scan and removed all the viruses only to have them reinstall when I started normally. I just restored the operating system and am now restoring files from my November backup. I'm not sure if that will restore my XP service packs and installed software. My ideal state would be that the restore from backup gets me to where I was last month, but I'm not sure that is going to happen.

Depends on whether you backed up your entire system along with the "system state" (registry), or if you only backed up your data files.

If you did a full system backup, then you'll be back to where you were in November. If you only backed up your data files, then you'll have to reinstall all of your software and system updates.

I may be hosed then. I used the standard backup utility in Windows and when I restore, it looks like it just restores files. How do I know for certain? I did the full file restore and some of my programs are there, but they are not installed, so some run and some don't.

You need to set NTback to save the register and just be on the old safe side I normally save the whole register out with regedit when I do my rare whole system backup.

When you use NTBackup, it's really easy to just select "my documents".

When you run the wizard, you're given the options "backup up everything", "backup up selected files", and "backup up system state". If you have the space, it's best to select "backup up everything".

When you restore after a system recovery, make sure you choose to restore everything.

Well, everything did not go as planned. My C: drive was restored from backup, but something is slightly off. I had to transfer all my documents from C:\Documents and Settings\engineer\My Documents to C:\Documents and Settings\engineer.LAPTOP\My Documents and while all my program files were restored, the something's up in the registry so that only some of them are usable. Most of the big programs like MS Office and I tunes won't run saying they have to be reinstalled. Anyone know of a simple way around this before I spend all day fishing out disks from my desk?

Sorry, no.

Ah well. Maybe I'll go ahead and try Windows 7 if I have to reinstall everything anyway.