[patriciawken]

Hi,

I am sort of desperate as I feel I am fighting against a ghost. For what I was able to gather, there has been "something" running on my laptop Dell Inspiron 1525, together with Windows Vista Home Premium OS, since August 7th-10th, 2009.

As I am usually not at home, I hadn't realised about it until now. And even though I have tried running anti virus, anti malware, anti everything known in the market, every programme did his job but ... of course, I didn't realise something that was VERY WRONG... I did not own my hard drive anymore. When my machine started crashing for no reason and worked extremely slowly, I tried changing some settings. When I tried to login as Admin, I realised I couldn't do so. When I finally did log in in safe mode, the "Documents and Settings" folder had disappeared! So I tried to run an antivirus, and then I found out that there were about 20 folders and files locked, "Documents and Settings" being one of them.

After doing some research, I also realised that I don't own the hard disk anymore. In some programmes is someone called TrustedInstaller and in others, the owner box is simply empty. When I try to move myself up there, the reply box says that the link to do so cannot be found.

I truly don't know how bad this can be for my privacy... but I presume it's very bad.

Today I turned off the wireless Inet Conn at home and I feel sort of helpless... All the restore points before the date above have disappeared and the last backup I did on an external disk was after that date so it probably has the "thing" already there.

The programmes I run were:

• AVG AntiVirus full version,
• IObit Advanced SystemCare,
• IObit Security 360,
• Spybot - Search & Destroy,
• Trend Micro - HijackThis, and

tried to install the Microsoft Windows Live OneCare safety scanner but it was impossible.

After doing all that several times not only I feel tired of going round in circles without accomplishing anything but sort of hopeless too.

Can someone help?
Many thanks

[Phantom010]

How to take ownership in Vista

[patriciawken]

Originally Posted by Phantom010

How to take ownership in Vista

Thank you very much Phantom010. Any ideas about the consequences I may have regarding my private documents?

[Phantom010]

TrustedInstaller is nothing to worry about. If you look at the page from my link carefully, you'll see the name in the Winload.exe Properties window: