Not too long ago I made the mistake of deleting my userinit.exe file out of the system folder while trying to tackle a slew of ever so fun viruses on my Windows XP desktop. Needless to say, upon restarting my computer, it went to the Login page (which it wasn’t supposed to) and every time I tried to login, I got faked out and sent back to the login page.
At the time, the simple solution for me was to get another HD, slave the old HD to the new one, copy over the userinit.exe file and I was back in business (many many many hours later).
Now a similar situation has come up but not by my own devices. I got attacked with multiple viruses at the same time while I was doing completely innocent things (browsing through dafont.com) and my computer came to a crawl. After about 20 minutes of painfully closing down applications and attempting to open Task Manager, it finally came up and I proceeded to stop the offending processes. 1 process, however, refused to stop: QTTask.exe. Some research has only revealed that people think it’s the QuickTime updater, but I know the updater shouldn’t take up 80-100% of my CPU and I know that a normal updater doesn’t immediately replicate itself after stopping the process.
I tried running a quick virus scan to see if I could catch some things. About 15 minutes into the scan, the scanner stop responding and soon after the computer completely froze. I manually shut down my computer and restarted. Then lo and behold it comes to the Login screen and is repeating the same issue I had previously.
Unfortunately, I don’t have another HD to work with and I want to explore all options before doing a reinstall and having to upgrade from SP1 to SP3/4 all over again. Any ideas?