Re: Malware disabling Firefox?

Mike Tomlinson wrote:
Trying to sort out a laptop for a friend of my Mum's. Got Spybot onto
it and ran a scan; less than a quarter of the way through it had already
picked up four nasties.

It has a dual-core Celery (T2300 from memory), 512MB RAM and is running
eXpee and AVGv8.5. Task Manager shows that the machine is over-
committed, so have ordered some more memory from Crucial for delivery on
Tuesday.

Running anything - Word2007, Spybot, etc. results in an orgy of hard
disc activity and the box runs like a dead slug.

After a couple of attempts I got Firefox installed ok (or so it says.)
But it won't run. Click on the icon, the hourglass appears, then the
normal cursor returns. At no point does firefox.exe appear in Task
Mangler. Reinstalled with same result.

Very suspicious of the machine - the Windows Update icon and AVG icons
aren't on the taskbar. Automatic Updates (control panel) is set to
receive updates and apply them automatically.

Going back on Tuesday with a copy of Process Manager on a write-
protected USB stick and a pair of gloves, but does anyone have other
suggestions please?

She transfers everything round on a stick which gets plugged into random
boxes up and down the country... most of which are run by teachers and
education authorities. Yes, I know. Can you say 'Typhoid Mary' ?

Wishing I hadn't got involved with this.

Try MalwareBytes Anti Malware program, and SuperAntispyware, both free programs.

Good luck
.

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