Painkiller667

You sound to be very cool, and the ESXi and iSCSI, whatever that is, also sounds really cool... espesically with the X and the "i's" that aren't capitalized. Those things all sound very cool. Contrary to what you say, I did watch the sites I visited, do keep a firewall and updated AVG running, and somehow still got that problem.

That's my opinion too, and I agree with you. And now I'm proud that someone "from the industry" has confirmed that you don't need to reformat at every POS spyware that you get. If you're using your XP disk like a whore and use your computer only for surfing then ok. But my pc has a lot of shit on it from many years which I wouldn't want to transfer back and forth.

Of course it's safer to do a reinstall but when a known malware was found, which is known to cause only a certain kind of problem, and is deleted, it's safe to use the OS again. No backdoors were created as I have a firewall and it never gave me any alerts about that kind of stuff. Not sure what caused it, must have been some website I visited.

Yes indeed, established fact that I did get rid of it entirely. Why argue, I told you already that every symptom of the problem that was observed is gone now, and the file that caused it was deleted by hijackthis upon reboot, when it wasn't being used by the system yet.

Thanks Zimmer, I can access the link now without a problem, because as I have said and as Sparda does not believe, I COMPLETELY got rid of the malware.

Dranfu, you only have 2 posts. Did you register just so you could help me out? Awww... how sweet..

I did get rid of it Sparda. Now my google search results in all browsers go directly to the links I click and Opera no longer crashes. CMD and Regedit open once again. You are extremely unprofessional for your rank on this forum. Dranfu, yes I know there is no such thing, I just named it that to draw attention. I agree the livecd scan would be the last method before reformatting but whatever you're scanning with, if the malware was only recently created, either from scratch, or by slightly modifying the code, no scanner will pick it up. It was a very specific problem. If only you could look at that link I mentioned in my previous post, dranfu, maybe you would be able to tell whether that problem would have been scannable or not. Seems like something only a manual job would be able to get rid of.

This particular malware didn't cause my stuff to "potentially been monitored." That link that I referred to in my previous post actually DID fix it. It is pretty new and unheard of, something that you either know or you don't, but it took just a few clicks and it actually fixed my problem. No need to reformat once again. I didn't fail, I won by finding the quickest and easiest way to fix my problem. You failed by telling me three times to format and not suggesting much else other than standard procedure. digip, thanks for helping, at least you honestly tried, but I knew there's got to be an easier way. As the girl in that forum who posted the solution determined, it was a new variant of the Win32:Daonol. Here's the whole thread once again http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic208323.html

You fail. Reformatting at every single quirk goes against every single ethic of a proper hacker. I always try to find what caused the problem, isolate it, and get rid of the cause instead of just blindly reformatting every week. I almost resolved the issue without having to reformat already. Yes perhaps a reformat does take 40 minutes, but how long does it take to back up all of the settings and files on an operating system that has been used without formatting for 4 years? Obviously you wouldn't understand if all you do is format and format again. That's probably why you have so many posts. You just keep telling people "Format."

Sorry for the triple post, but I got something interesting. After getting more symptoms of the problem, I was able to find a google result that shows another person had the exact same problem as me: LINK I noticed also that the following link that is on that page closes all my browsers. If I click on it, browser closes right away. Chrome, Opera, and Firefox all close INSTANTLY when I go to that url. So I can't even access it.. http://miekiemoes.blogspot.com/2008/10/fak...archengine.html

Just noticed that regedit and cmd no longer work when typed in Run menu. "command" still works.

Are you too lazy to explain why you gave me that link? I'm not using beta Firefox and I don't think I have that problem at all.

Yeah I said I did all that.

Yep there's something on my system but I'm not going to give up that easily. Any other suggestions? I also don't feel like doing the whole boot up in safe mode or with live cd and full scan..etc. Would there be any other simpler alternatives before that kind of serious work? You guys want to see my hijack this scan? ;)

Yeah, I know that the last resort is a reformat but I've had this OS installed for several years already and have always been able to avoid the reformat. I just tried to check my router's IP address by going to cmd in the run menu, and noticed that every time I type in CMD and click enter, it is as if my explorer.exe process gets restarted momentarily. No icons or taskbar on the screen for several seconds and then back to normal. In other words, CMD does NOT open! Automatic DNS is set up in properties of TCP/IP settings, but to access my router, which isn't wireless btw, I cannot. Tried typing 192.168.1.1 and .0.1 but couldn't get it. Probably not the problem anyway. My hosts file is fine, it has no entries other than the ones made by spybot SD.