[jshea1571]

So my brother waits 3 weeks for NTL (virgin) to finally fix his internet. Soon as they do, his son goes on it and gets a really nasty virus that wrecks his laptop! Can you help?
He has Windows XP on a two year old laptop.
Basically, if you try and launch any executable file it reroutes it through the virus so that all that happens is it comes up with the 'Open With' pop up. I tried using the run command to no avail. It won't even let me run the dos command prompt. If I put it in safe mode, it still does it. Every fix I see on the internet (which seems to find lots of similar viruses), involves downloading and running a program - which I can't do. After several hours I gave up, but I did find one small chink of light: you can boot it up in safe mode with command prompt and that's the only way in I can see.
I figure it's a registry virus, but you can't get into system to do system restore, you can't get into anything that involves running something on the system. The only way you can browse folders is by going to 'run' and then clicking browse.
That's it, that's as far as I got. It took me two hours to get that far and then I went home.
Incidentally, mozilla firefox works. Don't ask me how, but credit to the guys over there - I can get internet through firefox on the laptop. Maybe that will help.
Anyway, any help or ideas appreciated before the poor guy puts it into a rip off shop who will charge him a lot of money for very little work.
Thanks in advance.

[jshea1571]

Someone suggested it could be something like the SirCam virus? What do you think?