nasty boot virus

[jimvt]

I posted earlier today about a problem with what I think is a boot virus.
I've tried to uninstall Google, IE8, MSE, ant.com and some other stuff but after reboot each of the programs is back on my system

I got several replies one of which suggested downloading Ubuntu...which I did...but it got zapped before I could open it.

All the other email replies got deleted from my emails by this nasty thing. I did a clean boot start but it apparently didn't work.

I'd rather avoid "formatting" but I'm at the end of my rope with this thing.

I'm going to leave the computer on all night so I don't lose any suggestions or responses.

Thanks for any help.

Jim D

[JimBobIII]

How exactly did the file get 'zapped' before you could open or burn it?

Anyways, something that's always worked for me (granted, I've got almost no experience with viruses) is to look in the Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc), go to the processes tab, and look for something running that doesn't belong there. Granted, this won't work for everything, but it's a start. If you're not sure, it couldn't hurt to take a screenshot and post it here.

If you find something that doesn't look like it belongs, Google the process name and see what turns up. Usually, from there someone's probably got a guide to fix whatever problem you're having, although sometimes it involves using a second, uninfected machine or OS partition.

This is probably an obvious question, but you haven't seen any software you didn't install pop up recently, have you? Whenever I've seen similar issues it's because someone let a fake antivirus program work its way into the system, although there could be other causes and likely are; I just don't have experience dealing with them.

[Victor Leigh]

Try this.

Download Slacko Puppy from here:
http://puppylinux.org/main/Download%...%20Release.htm

Download Unetbootin from here:
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

Use Unetbootin to make a pendrive that can boot up into Slacko Puppy. Then copy out all the data that you want to keep. After that you can decide whether to re-install Windows or use Linux.