Help identifying/troubleshooting a virus

[Booty]

I'm working on a computer for a friend, who has an unknown virus (maybe viruses) on his machine. I didn't know that when I first got it... he just told me it was "acting funny" and asked me to check it out. Anyway, I installed Norton 2003 and, after the post-install reboot, was informed that the configuration had been altered, most likely by a virus (duh). So I then tried booting from the Norton CD to scan, but couldn't get it to boot that way, so I threw it into one of my clean systems with updated definitions and scanned.

Well, it came up clean. So then I created a rescue disk set, but the drive back in the original computer, and scanned that way... well, it took 7 hours to scan overnight, and found a 'trojan virus', but didn't say which one... if it gave details at any point, I missed them because, well, I'm not going to babysit a computer for 7 hours. So now I've got the drive back in one my machines going through virus removal tools, which is very uneffiecient because I have no idea which virus it is. I've been running them in order of most common recent viruses, but this is just a very ineffiecient way of taking care of this.

Anyway, some of the symptoms of the system where that he couldn't get quickbooks to update, then tried to use the 'search for files and folders' feature in xp and waited indefinately while nothing came up... some other parts of windows seem to be 'broken' or missing... anyway, does this sound familiar to anyone? I need help narrowing down what's causing this so I can get it fixed and outta my sight! Thanks in advance.

 

[Bucksnort]

Format

 

[Booty]

Thanks Dr. Obvious... as if I couldn't come up with that solution on my own. Sometimes there *is* another solution, you know? WIth all the software on this machine, it'll take just as long to reformat and reinstall everything than it is taking me to find a solution, so I might as well try to learn something. The easy route isn't always the best.

 

[JScalfani]

this may sound like a stupid answer but have you downloaded all the windows updates lately. My friend had the same problem with xp not wanting to open certain files so i updated xp and it worked fine afterwards.

 

[Booty]

not a stupid anser... in fact, I tried to do this, but whatever virus is on here is blocking windowsupdate.com, and I haven't found a way around that yet.

 

[Mem]

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