Okay, so here it goes. I got a call from a friend of mine who said she had a computer that she thought was infected with "some kind of virus", from something she was certain her "kids" downloaded. So now I have the "patient" as we've been calling it. Here are the current symptoms that I can see so far. This is a Dell Optiplex GX260 desktop running Windows XP sp3 1) Severe pop-ups from Antivirus 360 while in Normal mode. 2) Won't allow communication to or from IE7. 3) Now, the desktop "freezes" and I am unable to even move the mouse. 4) There is an icon in the quick launch toolbar for "A360". 5) A window was popping up from "Registry Mechanic" (?) stating that it "had detected changes to the registry". (this was immediately before the desktop would always freeze in Normal mode)
I have been starting the patient in Safe mode. So far what I have done, or attempted to do is that I first burned a copy of Malwarebytes onto a CD and run it. The .exe file would open up, and I would get as far as the very last window before the initiation of the scan. I click on finish, and then it would freeze up. So I thought maybe I did something wrong. So I attempted to remove Mbam from the computer, and I wasn't able to with Add/Remove programs. (It would freeze up during the removal process) So I burned a copy of Revo Uninstaller, and tried to remove Mbam with that, but I couldn't get that to operate either. I've tried to burn a copy of SuperAntispyware, Spybot, and Mbam onto a CD, and run the three of them on this machine, and got bad results. SuperAntispyware will not run. I just get a message stating that an error was detected and needed to report it to Microsoft.(?) Spybot actually loaded and ran through a scan, detected 2 registry errors, and that was it. Then again with Mbam, nothing would run completely through, meaning it now won't even begin to let me load the application. Whether I double click on the .exe icon, or right click, and chose "open", doesn't matter. I tried running system restore a couple of times when I first got the machine to see how stable it was, and I get to the window to pick a date to restore to, and that 's the end of the process. It would just hang right there, and do nothing.
So I here I sit with a machine that won't let me boot it in Normal Mode, and apparently won't let me download any software to it now either. I would appreciate any help you can offer. I am always here right now, as I am laid off work, so I should be able to respond pretty quickly to any messages sent to me. Thanks for your time.
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