my computer is just completely taken over by spyware and all this other stuff. so I surfed around and figured, okay, I need to download hijackthis and post that result somewhere so they can tell me what to do.

so far so good, right? but every time I download it, no matter where from, I can't get it to run. I've unzipped it and stuck it in its own folder. I double click, and I get an error reading "Unexpected Error" (helpful, ne?). I've tried both the versions listed on this site - no different with the older one.

yes, I've tried running spybot and adaware to get rid of this mess. spybot didn't get rid of much, and adaware keeps locking up in the middle of the scan. I suspect something is blocking it, but without a hijackthis result I don't know that anyone can tell me what's wrong.

what do I do? is there any way to get rid of this or at least find the problem without hijackthis?

There seem to be others having this problem. For starters, try downloading the Visual Basic 6 runtime libraries from Microsoft. On the off chance that you don't have them, programs written in VB6 need it installed to run.

Download here:

VB6

I know you have some of these already but here's my standard advice:

Download and update all of the following:

• Ad-Aware SE from http://www.lavasoft.de/
  There is a tutorial on how to run this here: Ad-Aware Tutorial
  
  
• Spybot Search & Destroy from http://www.safer-networking.org/index.php?page=download
  There is a tutorial on how to run this here: SpyBot S&D Tutorial
  
  
• SpywareBlaster from http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.html
  There is a tutorial on how to run this here: SpywareBlaster Tutorial

Reboot your computer in Safe Mode and run the anti-virus scan and anti-spyware scans there.
If you are not sure how to boot in Safe Mode there is a tutorial here: Safe Mode

See if that helps

downloaded the visual basic runtimes, it didn't fix the problem. oh well.

also downloaded spyware blaster, but kept being informed it preformed an illegal operation when I tried to run it.

booted into safe mode and ran adaware (it actually worked! THANK GOD!), got some 400 results, cleaned that up. ran spybot, it told me I was clean. but there were still some files that I recognized as stuff that kept installing after I deleted it so I ran norton.

it's now informed me that I have trojan.admincash.b, and it had infected the explorer file. well, I can't very well delete THAT. um... help?

What operating system are you using? You can extract explorer.exe from your os CD and overwrite the current one. If you are asked to save the current one, you can also save it and delete it.

Make sure you delete all your temp files and temporary internet files. Many infections will re-install from there. For Temporary Internet Files, open Internet Explorer, from the Tools tab choose Internet Options, then click Delete Files after checking the box for Delete Offline Content. For the other temp files, click Start -> Run and type

%temp%

and hit enter. Then select all the files from the edit menu and delete them all. If you have trouble with this, it might be easier in Safe Mode.

Hi emalie. Try running HijackThis from Safe Mode. It's not the best situation but it will at least get us started. If that works then post a log in the HijackThis forum here:

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/Hij...alysis-f22.html

Let them know that you are running it from Safe Mode because it will not run from a normal boot. If you don't tell them that they will simply ask you to send in a new log from a normal boot and it will just hold things up.

Cheers.

OT