Computer Taken over by viruses

Hi, my sisters computer is over run by viruses and bad scripts. Today I tried to help her out, I installed and ran ad-aware and spybot S&D, and then ran Norton 2004. Norton dtected well over 250 problems, and something like 75 viruses and trojans. Needless to say, Norton was unable to fix,quaranteen or delete any of the viruses or other problems. I am wondering if anyone can offer some advice on how I should proceed to clean her system. I would like to avoid reformatting, unless it just isn't worth the trouble. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

My advice would be to re-format.

Trust me you'll save yourself a lot of time and possible headaches.
Just reformat the whole thing and install everything and be done with it.

Anyways thats what I would do.

Man, that bites. There is almost no way to know what kind of harm has been done to the systme if it was that badly compromised. Someone might have installed backdoors, keyloggers, and lord only knows what else. I would strongly suggect backing up her personal data and wiping it out completely.

That's bad news, I know, but it is the only way to be sure. Sorry to hear it, WoS.

I agree with the reformatting of the drive. Obviously before you do this you will need to create a backup of “My Documents”, favorites and so on. Be careful when you reinstall these files because they are likely infected and would just re-infect the newly formatted drive. Install your antivirus update the definitions, install a firewall update it then install the documents. I know this is remedial information but many people forget.

Well thanks guys! I had a feeling that we may need to reformat, I was just hoping we wouldnt have to. Thanks for your responses!

just a suggestion.........

maybe try another anti-virus before re-formatting? I use AVG , which is free, and I found it fixes a whole ton of problems that Norton cant

you can find it at www.grisoft.com

give it a go, it might save you a reformat?

I just went through them same thing with a business that I take care of and spent about 6hrs trying to save one of their computers after all that trouble reformat was the only answer to get it all cleaned up. Try and backup all of her critical files and reformat.

Those fecking virus 'programmers' need disembowelling !!!!

I've had a hell of a job with some piece of # that changes my homepage and puts some crappy exe file on my desktop. Running AVG gets rid of it but if I forget to change the homepage back to Google, it loads the thing the trojan changed it to. Which of course is the page with the virus.
It's MS Media player based so thats fecked too. Bollocks !!!

My opinion is to go with mulberryblueshimmer and try AVG - thats a decent antivirus. If it doesnt work, then its back to dos and a nice little reformat.

Now ... time to find my poker and heat it up a bit

[Edited on 29-5-2004 by Pisky]

Yeah thanks. We reformatted and now have the proper counter measures installed on the computer. Your right Pisky, a hot poker for those that write viruses!!!

You should have booted into safe mode norton can get rid of everything under safe mode when I had a virus a while back it wouldn't go so I went into safe mode and got rid of it.