I opened a setup.exe, and it obviously was a piece of malware, because it visably did nothing.
When I boot up my PC, it will click (the click sound when you browse folders in explorer) and what seem to be IE windows open for a split second then dissapear. This causes the current window I am using to lose focus. This is mildly annoying.
After about 5 minutes of this, it will freeze whatever window I have focused, and try to copy a load of files to somewhere, it looks like after every file it hits the cancel button, then selects NO on the "are you sure you want to cancel" window, then copies the next file and repeats. Then after about 20 seconds it asks for a disk to be enetered for a certain file. Of course I hit cancel at this point, and it stops. The window I am using is now frozen and must be closed through task manager.
After this file transfer behavior, it seems to not do much more. But I left my PC on overnight, and when I woke up there was a guy talking about some product, and a very high pitch (like it's sped up) audio playing too. I couldnt see anything untoward in my task manager.
I have tried running hijakthis, ad-aware, and mcafee virus scan. The only thing that was picked up was a trojan by mcafee, but removing this didnt solve the problem, when I virus scan the trojan is back. I've done this both in normal boot and safe mode.
Does anyone have any idea what this malicious code is? Searches on google for the symptoms come up with nothing.
I don't see anything untoward in the hijakthis log, but I will update this post with a link to a thread i'll create in the hijakthis log forum.