Hi Experts,

I'm an advanced PC user and can't believe I got a virus. First in years. Embarrassing, but there you go.

Anyway, it's Antivirus System Pro, and it's blocking many of my EXEs including Malwarebyte's Anti-Malware, so that's not working. \

The bit of reading I've done here suggests to me a fair amount of work ahead of me to clean this up (hours of time). So, I'm over due for a full reformat anyways, and thought I'd just do that instead, as I've another PC (uninfected) I can work on.

My question:

1) Will a reformat of my PC (HP Desktop running Vista Ultimate) completely remove this annoying virus?

Thanks in advance,

Dave

Your decision as to what action to take should be made by reading and asking yourself the questions presented in these articles:

• When should I re-format? How should I reinstall?
• Help: I Got Hacked. Now What Do I Do?
• Where to draw the line? When to recommend a format and reinstall?

In some instances an infection may have caused so much damage to your system that it cannot be completely cleaned, repaired or trusted especially if you are dealing with rootkit components that can hook into the Windows 32-bit kernel, and patch several APIs to hide new registry keys and files they install. The malware may leave so many remnants behind that security tools cannot find them and a Repair Install will NOT help!. Reinstalling Windows without first wiping the entire hard drive with a repartition/reformat will not remove the infection. The reinstall will only overwrite the Windows files. Any malware on the system will still be there afterwards. Starting over by wiping your drive, reformatting, and performing a clean install of the OS or doing a factory restore with a vendor-specific Recovery Disk or Recovery Partition removes everything and is the safest action but I cannot make that decision for you.