[JohnWill]

I have a somewhat general question about malware removal. I'm obviously not an expert, as evidenced by my lack of a gold shield.

I recently deloused a system with a ton of malware of various kinds, and I was just curious if my experience was typical. After uninstalling all of the obvious stuff from Add/Remove programs, I ran SuperAntiSpyware and the Trend on-line virus scan and removed all the stuff they found. Then I reviewed the HJT log and killed off a few more items. I then downloaded ComboFix and ran that. The odd thing was that I had to do this stuff iteratively to finally clear everything, after several virus scans, antispyware scans and ComboFix runs, I finally got rid of everything.

Is this a normal progression? Is there a "right" sequence to do all this stuff in to minimize the labor?

[mongo_nc]

Depending on how nasty the malware in question was, what you experienced is not abnormal. I once spent nearly 15 hours ridding a few malware programs from a computer. The reason why I spent that long and didn't reload it was because it was an accounting machine that had antiquated programs on it with no install software available, so reinstalling the OS would've rendered the system even more useless than it was. Sometimes it takes quite a bit of patience and guile to remove malware.