Virus?

riddik

Recently, AVG brought up its usual 'virus detected' window and I clicked delete, then almost immediately it did the same again, but before i could click anything, the window disappeared and windows restarted for no apparent reason. Now windows security centre is telling me two things
a] Windows firewall is off, but when you try to access windows firewall through control panel nothing happens,
and
b] automatic updates are off, but they are actually turned on.

Also, when I try to use IE it keeps telling me;
"Internet Explorer could not open the site 'http://....'.

Operation aborted."

I am almost certain this is a virus, so I was goin to run the dell system restore back to factory settings as theres not much on it or does anyone know a simpler way of solving this problem

Karoma

boot into safe mode + scan for viruses and spyware

Static M.e.

Download and run Stinger see what it picks up and then look for that Virus patch

http://vil.nai.com/vil/averttools.asp

riddik

thanx!

riddik

that stinger idea went really badly so i reformatted. it did find some variant of a virus then it just ****ed a lot of things up. wasnt worth the effort me thinks

azezil

Stinger is a bit of a mixed bag imo, while it is a nice small application which effectively removes viruses, it doesn't prompt the user if they wish to remove the virus, or if you wish to quarantine, I have seen it delete files that weren't actually viruses.