[mmason1983]

Hi all,

I'm slightly embarrassed to be posting here as a 10 year support tech, but I have been crippled by a virus/trojan which has disabled my PC's functionality. It started when I was at work; a roomate infected the PC and left it running all day becoming more and more infected until I got home.

Explorer does not run, I can't browse to any hard drive or cd-rom, and when attempting to install SAS, StopZilla, Symantec (already installed but crashes on run), or any other AV software I receive the message "Your system administrator has set policies to prevent this installation"

I have attempted going to safe mode to no avail, the problem persists there as well. A work-around I've found is opening the dos shell from task manager which still works, but I can't get into the control panel to change or look at any administration settings or group policies due to explorer not openning when I attempt to run it.

I was able to download a bitdefender recovery CD which got over a hundred malware files disinfected, I quarunteened the ones it couldn't repair. However the version of linux bitdefender boots off of cannot recognize my on-board ethernet card and I was unable to update the virus definitions, and the basic problems of not being able to run any AV software, navigate to any AV-related site, or even manually execute explorer.exe still remain.

If anyone can help me, I am desperate for assistance with this as I have important programs loaded on this computer which I no longer have the install disk for and I don't want to reinstall windows due to the amount of accumulated data/etc that I would lose.

Can anyone recommend another boot-cd which might have more up-to-date virus definitions or some other means of getting Antivirus (and mayhap even explorer) running so I can clean this PC?