I bought a refurbished PC a few weeks ago and have been struglling to keep it clean since.
It came with an OS on a hidden partition – XP SP1. I did get so frustrated that I tried to reformat the drive and install the OS from scratch, but it did a “quick” format and that didn’t seem to clean out some of the virus files. I have spybot, ad aware and avg. I would no sooner clean one out and I would get another. I tried installing SP2, but it did something weird to my network connections(reporting bad connections) so I had to back out.
I’ve had SdBot, Padobot, Sasser and others come and go. I’ve turned off system restore, booted into safe mode, run Stinger. I clean things out, and they still return.
Finally yesterday I got all of the MS security updates installed, but stil struggling. I have cleaned every virus and spyware known to these vendors, but I still get an application called WPEL.exe running. I have deleted it and tried to purge it from pre-fetch and registery. It still comes back. I have also noticed that TFTP runs (I manually turn it off from the task manager) and a task called MSNMSGR7 – which as far as I know is not the windows or msn messenger service. I am frustrated – I have tried playing online games only to have my session hijacked(and I play better than the hijaker).
Any ideas?
James