Some kind of follow up...

I think something is corrupting my McAfee firewall. It is set to "off" and can't be turned back on. I can't force close the firewall process for some reason, and its the only McAfee process that is unstoppable. I checked in the core file for the firewall, and found a suspicious-looking file that says to have been modified/placed in the file on December 6th, 9:14 EDT. The same time I started having issues.

You use both IE "and" McAfee together!!! Why????

Even with IE 9 you're miles behind the likes of Firefox. With anything to do with the net MS is a market trailer and not leader.

 

E 9 is my thing only because I can tab website to the taskbar.

Wow! Really? I've been doing that for ten years!!!!! More actually as that feature was available even in Netscape! The number after IE denotes how many years behind MS is!

 

And, as for anti virus software both Norton and McAfee are dinosaurs (although Precambrian would be a more accurate classification!). They are bloated, costly, wasteful of memory, and they slow down any running application to a crawl.

There are plenty of top notch anti virus programmes available and they are free!!!!

Avira is one of the best just as an example. Run that in conjunction with Spybot S&D and you're home and dry.

Your mission should you choose to accept it is to ditch IE and McAfee forthwith. If you don't your avsim account will self destruct in 5 seconds!!!

 

Your mission should you choose to accept it is to ditch IE and McAfee forthwith. If you don't your avsim account will self destruct in 5 seconds!!!

It's a done deal. IE has given me pains throughout my times with it, and I stupidly forgot about a bookmarks bar...anyways, unpinning websites and pinning Chrome to the taskbar now. I'll look at Avira very soon.

 

This found and cleaned a virus that 3 others didn't. Free online scan.

 

http://www.eset.com/us/online-scanner/

http://www.eset.com

 

Hook

Hook, thank you so much, it took 6 hours, but this thing has rid my rig of all threats.

1st - create a bootable USB stick ( winpe or bartpe or any other OS that will allow you to examine your files on you windows OS drive.

 

2nd - look for obvious malware in your profile folder.. such as any *.exe file named with random characters ... you can rename them by adding something to the beginning of the original name... that way if you do something that breaks your OS start up you can always go back and rename it back.

 

3rd look in your registry for bogus start up files... ie. HKLM\sofware\currentversion\windows\run .. From the Menu in regedit select LoadHive and navigate to your profile\ntuser.dat file and give it whatever name you like... look in that hive for bogus files in you windows\run key ( this is your HKCU keys ) *** these files may be the same ones you renamed above..

You can also load the HKLM software reg by loading the hive from windows\system32\config\software name whatever ...search again..

 

Unload the Hives you just loaded....

 

This may get you ' clean ' enough for other cleaning apps can clean your pc the rest of the way.. ( I am a fan of Malwarebytes as well ).

 

Malware can be really nasty... and most commercial software providers have downloadable cleaning cd's that can help as well...

 

Mark Russinovich has some really good malware cleaning videos that may help you as well.

Hook, thank you so much, it took 6 hours, but this thing has rid my rig of all threats.

 

Glad that did the trick. I bought the full security suite as soon as the online scan fixed my problem and have been using it ever since.

 

I'd never heard of ESET or NOD32 until I read a guide on extreme hardware tweaking for FSX. And I do mean extreme. The most interesting thing in the guide was that NOD32 didn't use enough resources to bother shutting it down to run FSX. I've never had to shut it down even to install any software. It runs politely in the background, only popping up a dialog asking if you want to allow internet access to a new or changed program. I haven't noticed it slowing down the boot process, which some security packages do.

 

Oh, and IE9... I use it occasionally with FireFox as my default browser. There are still a couple of things IE does that I like better. Note: I was using Netscape almost from the beginning, back in the days when they offered more features than IE.

 

Hook