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XP slow after spyware removal

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by pault

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Hi, I'm on my 3rd week of debugging spy/ad/mal ware rom my system. Things are back more or less to normal but there is sometomes a 5-6 second delay between clicking/typing and the system reacting. Very annoying. I have Spybot, adaware, spysweeper, norton 2004, adbuster, hijackthis and now zonealarm firewall. But things are very much slower than before. I have a pentium 4, 1.8, 256k.

Do I still have some kind of bug? If I do nothing is finding it. I have tried everything I can think of.

Thanks

4 replies

by jimmy

Are all these applications set to start up on the system from first boot.

Type run msconfig and check the startup tab.

Then look in here for anything suspicious. I would however uncheck some of the applications you have running as they may be counteracting each other.

I would run

Hijackthis
Norton
Zonealarm

That way you have a spyware, antivirus and firewall all in place but the other applications i would unchceck in msconfig >startup tab.

Also try and online virus scanner like trendmicro or housecall just to be on the safe side.
go to windows update and update all the windows patches for your system.

Hope this helps.

by cp7212

There is a spyware named VX2. It installs an executable in your WINNT\System32 folder. It is written as MS-DOS. The file will show as a Windows-executable and it will be at the end of the directory. It's name is something like yygxmm.exe. It's the only executable at the end that looks like a garbled name. Windows is always using this file, so you have to go into Safe Mode to remove it, then reboot. Check out your directory and if you have it, remove it. Hope this helps.

by cp7212

Ad-Aware did not pick this up initially. They now have an add-on tool for VX2 that can be found at www.lavasoft.com. It works for some people. I have read mixed reviews in forums about it. The least you can do is try it.

by pault

Thanks for the suggestions. Wouldn't the VX2 get picked up by my anti virus/spy/ad programs? I did a quick look for suuch an entry in win32 but didn't see it.

Thks,
pt

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