need help: virus, worm, spyware?

my wonderful children have infected my computer with some kind of virus, worm, or intuitive spyware.

my curser is blinking irratically, but still works fine.

my system is running very slow when connected to the internet.

and most important, i keep getting adds popping up that are related to words in the address, or even the body, of web pages. the adds are appearing in an IE window, but have no toolbars.

My avg antivirus has not picked anything up so I downloaded threatfire from tucows.com--it appears to be worthless.

if someone can give me instructions on how to fix this I would greatly appreciate it; or, if anyone can direct me to a free virus/spyware program, please do so. I would go back to tucows and download another, but I am still on dial-up because of my area. It takes hours to download a program and I do not wish to waste my time with another lemon.

thanks in advance

onecare.live.com...

or Malwarebytes Anti-Malware
for scan.

Comodo antivirus and firewall

All for free

reply to post by supertrot


This is a program that I have had a lot of success with and it is free, just install and up date the scan, it takes about 2 hours to do on my system.

www.malwarebytes.org...

Malwarebytes is a site dedicated to fighting malware. Malwarebytes has developed a variety of tools that can identify and remove malicious software from your computer. When your computer becomes infected, Malwarebytes can provide the needed assistance to remove the infection and restore the machine back to optimum performance.

reply to post by supertrot


Your problem sounds almost exactly the same as one I had about a month ago. I have some ideas on what is happening to your system.

I'll dig out the thread and post what I did to fix it.

In a nutshell (in my case):

Ads kept popping up in an IE window. My system was extremely slow.

What caused it: some bug/virus/whatever had entered a bunch of batch jobs into the startup file. The same job was spawned once a minute. The job was IE.

I used a tool call ProcesQuickLink (free) which does several things, one of which shows which processes are running. As soon as I could delete iexplorer.exe, another one would spawn.

I then used another free tool called Autoruns to look at scheduled jobs. That's where I saw the culprit. Then it was an easy step to kill the offending executable.

I had help with this from a very kind member (thanks ArMap); he pointed me toward the tools to use.

Btw, no anti-virus, malware, etc. programs found anything.

Edit: Here's the thread detailing my issue. Hope it helps.

www.belowtopsecret.com...

[edit on 13-4-2009 by jsobecky]