Persistent Virus Has Me Stumped

Originally posted by nineix
You should never ever need to reformat your computer, unless you're doing things you oughtn't and have Fatman on standby to nuke it into a safe pile of unrecoverable digital ashes.

Actually, at first sign of an infection, it is reccomended to reformat your computer.
It's wise to take full disk backups regularly just in case.

When your computer shows signs of a break in, or malware. Reformat. There is no way to know if the "virus" has been removed afterwards. The only true way to know your computer is "clean" is to simply wipe and reinstall.

I'm speaking as a linux user here, so things may or not be possible under windows. But usually its as simple as cloning the whole device bit for bit directly to a file. If you ever get a problem, you just rewrite the image, this also stops malware which lives in the boot sector of systems, as the MBR is also saved into the cloned image, when you restore it, the MBR is also restored.