Does anyone know how to get rid of this (^%*^#G piece of %(^*%T^GR& ????

My wife and son have a laptop that only they use. They are always downloading games off the internet. You know the ones that let you play for 30 mins and then they expire if you dont pay? I told them to stop doing it because downloading games and porn are magnets for viruses, but of course they didnt listen. The laptop has been slow as hell for a while because of all of this but now oneof them somehow downloaded Malware Protection 2008.

Ive done some internet searching and found that it is very hard to ged rid of. DUH !!! I wouldnt have been searching if I hadnt already found that out for myself.

Its almost impossible to do anything because it has somehow blocked me from clicking anything except the Malware Icon to turn it on. I cant even click the "start" button. Nothing happens. I can sometimes open control panel but when I click anything in there, nothing happens. I cant remove the progam that way. I cant delete the file.

Wiki tells me a long list of files to delete, but I cant get to them.

The laptop randomly restarts so it can open the Malware progran for me if I dont open it. My wallpaper is now replaced with their warning that i am infected with spyware. Then it starts running and suppossedly scanning my computer so it can tell me I am infected with spyware and wants me to buy their program. I cant download a real spyware program because it wont let me open Internet Explorer.

After 5 tries, i was able to restore the computer and it was fine for about 5 mins and then the Malware program somehow reinstalled itself and started running.

HELP !!!!!

And while I don't recommend others do it, I tested Avira's anti-virus software by downloading the Malware Protector 2008 from their site. Immediately after downloading the file, it detected it as a virus and denied access to it saving to my HD.

EP9 has a good plan.

What about a system restore point before all this happened?

Are you guys running a firewall?

This thing is just nasty. I tried several times to restore but every time I click the button nothing happens. One time it actually worked and I restored to about a month ago. The computer rebooted and all was well for about 5 mins. Then somehow the virus re-launched itself and the same things started all over again.

At this point I cant do pretty much anything. I cant open any programs or files even is safe mode. There is no way to get any malware removal programs onto the laptop because I cant launch the program. I DL'd 2 different spyware removal programs on my clean computer. I put them on a thumb drive. I botted the laptop into safe mode and put the thumb drive in. I can see the removal programs but cant launch the set up program.

Just now I tried to reformat the enitre hard drive by using the CD that came with the laptop and not even that will run.

If no one else can help, one thing you may want to think about is getting a new drive, then you can get a USB tray for your old drive and pull files off of it.

You could also try an adaptor like this to hook it up to your other computer and clean it if you have good virus protection on your other system.

At the least you should be able to reformat it this way.

http://www.cablestogo.com/product.asp?c ... nAodS2fJXQ

I can't tell you what the infection risk to the other system is though.

With viruses, going back to system restore generally won't fix the problem because the virus has spread to so many different parts of the computer (registry, boot.ini, startup options, temp files, internet settings, host file, etc). If you're unable, even in safe mode to make these changes, you have some limited options. Beavis mentioned one.

Another is to get a minimal OS, like Bart PE, onto a bootable CD and boot to that. At work we do this often so we can "re-image" someone's computer to a clean slate (and load up our company's default starting configuration for computers), or to remove files we couldn't remove inside Windows. There's also a few "Ultimate Boot CDs" that don't require needing to load into windows to fix various issues, but you have to really know what you're doing because you can do a LOT of harm this way if done wrong.

That you can't even use the XP installation CD to format and partition the drives is incredibly rare unless there are hardware issues (viruses don't physically damage hardware like that). I would recommend taking the computer into a professional repair shop and having them look at it if you can't even get this step to work right.

Is that a typo and its really AdAware? Or is ther also an As-Aware?