Hi everebody
My computer was infected with a trojan virus today, from a link from someone on msn messenger. I ran AVG Free and the virus went to the vault, which i have deleted and all seems to be running fine now. however, i've had to vault it three times. when I restart, the virus seems to reappear. but my computer is running fine.

but...

there is an icon on my desktop titled winstall.exe which when scanned doesn't contain a virus, but I have just had a quick scan thru some stuff on the internet and get the idea that its a nasty little program that lets other nasty stuff infect my computer I can't delete it, and in fact, am not sure if this is accurate and am a little worried its an important windows file i shouldnt be deleting at all.

I've now installed Avira Antivir as well, as a double up safety precaution, but no spyware detection programs as yet (I'm not even sure if I'm wording that correctly..)

help??
Thank you

 

Sadly it appears as though you have been infected by the SpySherrif malware, ref here. Do you have SpySherrif installed anywhere (on the All Programs menu for example)?

The issue with the virus reappearing is that it is designed to reinstall itself when you reboot. You should start by running a virus-scan in safe mode. To enter safe-mode switch on your computer and repeatedly press F8 before the Windows bootscreen appears. Select Safe Mode from the options. When in Safe Mode, turn off 'SYSTEM RESTORE' if using Windows ME or Windows XP. To do this go to Control Panel, double click SYSTEM then click on SYSTEM RESTORE tab and tick the option to 'Turn OFF system restore on all drives' and click Apply and wait 30 seconds or so. Run your virus scan, AVG should find it and place it in the vault. Once completed reboot as normal into regular mode.

Secondly, download Spybot, Ad-aware and Windows Defender (only if you have genuine Windows XP) from the following link: http://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/showpost.php?p=22768&postcount=3

For these anti-spyware softwares, download the updates (each has a manual option to do this) and run a scan ensure you remove what they find.

Reboot. Does this help any? If not, you may wish to repeat the above procedure in Safe Mode. We may also be best getting you to run a HijackThis scan, but we can come to that later.

Also don't have two anti-virus applications running at the same time, they will conflict with each other and ultimately reduce the safety of your system.

Dave