Ask EU: Windows XP problem

If all the linux gurus could not say "Use a decent OS" and all the Mac
users stop sniggering in a "ha! this never happens to us" kind of
way,then I'll begin.

A friend is running XP Home on her lap top.

She had trouble installing (possibly) Trend Micro AV scanner. And
trouble uninstalling it too. The machine tried to say she had
insufficent rights to do so. On the sugestion of the man in the shop
she downloaded Grisoft Freeversion. This too claimed insufficint
rights but did install. It won't update however for the same reason.

The account she is using has full administrator rights. It seems to be
the only account on the machine, although see later.


An online scan using the Bitdefender site showed "Trojan.Peed" (aka
Storm) had infected the machine. This was allegedly removed.


Spybot Search and Destroy didn't show much other than a few cookies.

A bit of digging on the Grisoft forum suggsted a way of rejigging the
rights by using subinacl from microsoft. However when trying to
install that utility it said she didn't have administrator rights or
the Windows installer was borked.

More digging showed a way to re register the windows installer,
Msiexec, by starting in safe mode and doing a bit of command line
stuff.

When running in safe mode two users were apparent, Administrator and
Friend's Name. When in normal mode only Friend's Name was visible.

Reregistering Msiexec didn't work using the Adminitrator account. In
hindsight using the Friend's Name accont might have been better.

The other way of gettingthe intaller to work was to re-intall it. I
went home for my dinner before I could try this.


Questions:

1. Is the machine still infected with something bad,given the way
the user names change in safe mode?

2. Is the trojan really removed?


3. Any other simple things to try?
--

Tim

fast and gripping, non pompous, glossy and credible.
.