What's foul?

[slpavman]

Today when I tried to boot up I noticed that my NAV 2003 wasn't running in the taskbar. First I tried to manually start NAV then I tried to go to MSCONFIG and I got an error message that said "this operation has been cancelled due to restrictions on this computer. Please contact your system administrator." (not much help, since I'm the system administrator) I tried to go to the task manager to see if it was running in the background or something, and task manager won't even come up .... I then went back and used system restore to restore back 2 days ago, but nothing changed.

Since I dual boot, I ran NAV from my Win98 partition. It found a couple of viruses, but upon reboot into WinXP the same problem exists.

Tried to fix this using gpedit.msc and disabling remove task manager, but no change ... I also uninstalled the last Win update (as long as they are in descending order (last installed=last listed) in the add/remove programs list).

Did I get a virus or a bad WinXP update? Is my O/S corrupted? Should I try the WinXP repair?

Any more ideas .... please?

 

[Damaged]

Make sure you don't have the BIOS virus protection enabled. I had been having some troubles with one of my boxen and had returned the BIOS settings to default, then thought that I had returned everything back to what I wanted. Wrong. Missed the fact that had become enabled by returning to the default settings.

May be that, may not be. Worth a look though.

 

[slpavman]

Okay, I'll reboot and check that now ... thx

 

[slpavman]

Nope, wasn't enabled ...

Now I see that it won't let me go to any url if the word "virus" is in the string ...

 

[imported_Phil]

Try RAV Antivirus or Trend's HouseCall for an online virus scanner.

Oh, and if you could list your Task Manager list of running programs, I can probably tell you what you can kill off that is likely to be a virus so you can do a scan.

 

[slpavman]

I will try RAV antivirus, but I can't get into my task manager to see which programs are running and I have already tried Trend Housecall (pcillin). Pcillin did find a couple of viruses that NAV had missed, but after it cleaned or deleted them, I still have the same problems...

(BTW, I can't click on your links - they won't open - due to the virus I think, but I can copy the shortcut, send it to my Win98 partition and reboot into Win98 and run it). I'll try that ...

 

[slpavman]

Well I tried to run RAV from my WinXP partition, but it wouldn't let me - it just shut down IE every time I tried ... so I ran it from my Win98 partition and it found 15 viruses! This is after running NAV several times and Pcillin 3 times ! Now I need to go back and run it again and tell it to "autoclean" any viruses it finds ... (pretty obvious at this point that it IS a virus ...)

 

[slpavman]

Well ... I manually deleted all of the files RAV said were infected and the last 3 scans (1 from PC-Cillin and 2 from RAV all showed no viruses) but I still can't access my task manager or run NAV in my XP partition ... I'm not sure if I still have a virus that NONE of the main AV programs can detect or just the remnants of one that I don't know how to correct I tried to uninstall NAV (with the intention of reinstalling) ... it won't even let me do that! As sad as I am to say it ... I may have to reformat and start all over ! I REALLY don't want to do that (since I just did it a couple of months ago and it takes me two weeks to reinstall everything!

 

[Booty]

can you make a rescue disk set with norton and scan your XP partition? I'd agree that it's definately a virus... I don't know what else to do except either scan with rescue disks or try to scan it in/from another system.

 

[slpavman]

Well, none of the stuff in Norton is working correctly from the XP partion (either NAV or Norton Utils). I tried a registry cleaner (Ace Utils 2.1) but that just locked the system up. I did find out I can boot into safe mode and THAT will allow me to access the task manager, but nothing strange appears to be running and I still can't run command line executables. I also tried to install another firewall (I know -day late/dollar short), and it appeared to install correctly - but it won't activate. SAd to say, it's looking more and more like I am going to have NO CHOICE but to format and reinstall ...

 

[slpavman]

Well one of the members over at futuremark.com gave me some help by linking me to highjack and then telling me the things I needed to fix in my registry start up. This is a pretty cool program, but takes a little experience and practice to know what you are doing in it ...

I have been able to fix the majority of my problems with the exceptions of : not being able to enable NAV auto protect (or to uninstall it from the control panel) and not being able to run config.sys from the command line (but it will let me run regedit ...) I think sopmething was deleted or corrupted in NAV.

Maybe I won't have to reinstall my O/S afterall ... but at the least I should be able to back up the data I want to save, with fair confidence that it isn't infected, and then copy it back after an O/S reinstall ...

 

[imported_Phil]

If you want to remove Norton Antivirus, search the Symantec site for something called "RNAV"- a little utility that will force uninstallation of said software; very good if the Add/Remove process won't work.

 

[slpavman]

Thx! I'll try that!

 

[slpavman]

Woohoo finally tracked that bastard down (with a little help from someone over at futuremark)

the virus

NASTY little ah heck! May be pretty hard to recover from! (Still not sure why NAV didn't stop the damn thing!)

Thx for any and all help provided peeps!