Recently I found that I was infected with "antivirus soft" after doing a search on google about it, and was directed to a link on this site containing a guide to removing it... : http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-remo...-antivirus-soft
Eventually, through using that guide, I was happily able to seemingly remove it with Malwarebytes after having to re-apply the steps a few times, until it finally found nothing and therefor I thought I was clean.. but then I began to notice various other strange issues like programs not responding very quickly, or at all.
The most annoying being that I found I could not remove unwanted files in the add/remove folder, as it would say the windows installer service was already in use. While inspecting it further I found one, and sometimes two copies of msiexec.exe always running no matter how much I tried to end the task. In services.msc, Windows Installer is set to manual, and both the start and stop buttons are greyed out even though the service says it's started. I've tried various things to get it to work, including trying to download windows installer 3.1, but no amount of clicking the link ever works to load the download, and nowhere else have I found a viable option to getting it to work for me.
Eventually today, and I'm not even sure how it happened, but there was a small window in which I found msixec.exe wasn't in the task manager window and I decided I'd uninstall malwarebytes and try to re-install it, as the update gave me an error the first time.. and success.. it uninstalled, and then while trying to uninstall ad-aware, it got caught up in a seeming loop, trying to access the windows installer, so I just ended the task and now dreadfully msiexec.exe is back always on in the task manager.
Then while on firefox trying to figure it out I a get a popup message:
Windows Internet Security
Your browser is under the threat of infection. Windows requires your permission to install online protection tool.Your browser is run in unsafe mode. Running the protection mode will help you to keep your computer safe. Staying at the suspicious website in unsafe mode may lead to the loss of personal data and computer breakage. To run the web browser in protected mode Windows requires installing the certified antivirus scanner software and online protection tool.
name: Online Protection Tool
publisher: Microsoft Windows
It seemed rather fishy, so after searching that, I found this link: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/248434/redirector-causing-issues-in-ie7-in-xp/ that looked like the same issue, so I go to download malwarebytes again and found the malwarebytes site didn't work for me, and while trying to find alternate routes to it, found I was getting redirected, etc, and sometimes just appearing like the site was down. eventually I found a working link to the download, got it installed, and then found another error not letting me update. I tried a link to manually downloading the definition updates but the link brings me to a downed site, so I'm a bit stuck as I know I need those update definitions but can't get them, and I'm not sure what else to do at this point :/.
I'm using Windows XP Professional, Service Pack 3, with latest windows updates.
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