Roy,
I'm glad you followed my hunch that it might indeed be a rootkit. I've
had clients with those before, so I have had to deal with them on
several occasions myself.
You would still be best advised to do a full reinstall from a clean,
freshly formatted disk. If the rootkit authors were clever, they could
have inserted a "back door" that would keep the system vulnerable.
I don't recall if you said which version of Windows is on your wife's
machine, but if it will support Win 7 that would probably be the best
idea if she still insists upon running Windows--since that is what is
getting nearly all of Microsoft's attention in security matters.
It is still a very good idea to be sure she has a very good firewall,
anti-malware and anti-virus programs in place and properly set. Even
so, that will not protect the average user who tends to click on "OK"
whenever a warning shows up from their security software.
As your experience shows, some of these things take multiple products
to find and eliminate. That should also make everyone realize that
relying upon a single program for a particular aspect of security is
not always a good idea.
The other issue is that for a security program to be effective, it
often must be quite sensitive--which in turn can lead to many false
positives. In that case, the user is often lulled into thinking things
are always false positives, and in turn that leads ignoring warnings.
Keep trying to get her to shift to Linux!
David
--- In LINUX_Newbies@
>
> First the good news. It is gone. The bad news is that it was a rootkit as
> someone suggested. I am crossing my fingers that no personal info was lost.
>
> I tried several Linux rescue CDs to no avail. It was clean as far as they
> could tell. I then installed unhackme in Windows and it did the trick. It
> found the rootkit but it took several tried and re-boots to remove it. I
> hope that it is gone. I managed to re-install avg and the firewall, so that
> at least is a positive sign.
>
> I hate Windows. Now that I have that off of my chest, I can get on with
> enjoying Linux. I am in Sabayon tonight. Life is good!
>
> Thanks for your help and encouragement.
>
> Roy
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