[heather1029]

Ok...this may be hard to explain and if it doesn't belong in this forum, I appologize and will move it to where it should be. But on to the point:

Sorry it's longer than the bible, but you'll understand when you see how bad it is

My husband is a computer tech, and we sometimes fix virus/spyware issues for friends and family. Usually, I can handle running scans and cleaning things up during the day and when he gets home he'll check over to make sure everything is alright. But for the past 24 hours we're BOTH way in over our heads and are about to just wipe and reload the poor guys machine.

INFO:
Dell 755 Optiplex
Vista Business 32 bit

*let me know what else you'll need*

I get this guy's computer, he says it's slow and "running funny". We run malware bytes, it finds about 15 viruses and repairs them. I run spybot, it picks up on the dreaded AntiVirus 2008 crap, so spybot takes care of that. I run hijack this to find any left over tid bits, but nothing looks out of place (again, I'm not the expert, I know what should be on the machine but I don't always catch things that SHOULDN'T be). Just in case, my husband tells me to run combo fix. I've done it several times before, I do understand how to do it and the safety precautions to take. I ran it in safe mode, no anti virus stuff running at the time, i didn't click in the screen, and so forth and so on. Then a weird thing happens...while it's running I get an error message reguarding some file associated with AOL being corrput. So after combo fix is done the log shows that it really found nothing worthy of repair. But now I'm getting a few messages about AOL files being corrput. So I just uninstall the damn thing and plan to reinstall it before giving him the machine back. Ok...here's where I mess up...the things still running slow, I uninstalled AOL, i figure the registry could use a little cleaning. I use Eusing registry cleaner. I apparently know just enough to be dangerous. I've used the crap before and it's never harmed anything, but that's just sheer luck because I really don't know enough to be messing with that stuff anyway. I reboot, things are still slow and I'm getting frustrated. I then tried to uninstall another program of his only to find the computer tell me I can't while in safemode...only I didn't think I was in safemode...i told the machine to boot in 'normal mode'. And it DOES NOT say safemode on the screen, the wallpaper is there, it was quite a deception. I type ECHO %safeboot_option% in cmd and sure enough I'm apparently in safemode with networking. So now I'm really weirded out, restart the machine in order to TRY to boot into 'normal mode' only this time i can't get in Vista AT ALL. I get as far as the login screen and it freezes or has a crazy blinking monitor seizure . GREAT...my first thought is that I royally screwed the registry and I foolishly made no backup. I don't have his vista cd, I'm pretty much screwed. I managed to get a vista recovery cd, did the repair my system thing and found out there was a system volume problem, which supposidly was fixed. But sure enough, same crap upon restart, so i use the boot CD again. This time i get in cmd and manually restore the registry from RegBack (risky, i know but i was desperate and crying). Anyway, i wasn't stupid enough to override anything I copied all the original reg files (default, sam, security, etc AND the .savs) to C:\temp so that I could undo all of this if needed. And YAY the thing boots up and I am able to log in!!! But don't break our the champagne yet...upon starting up I get about 7 app errors for various programs such as spybot teatimer and acrotray all of which tell me .dll files are missing or corrupt. Then it freezes completely and I lose all icons, start menu, etc and ctr alt delete decides to not show up to the party. So I turn it off and walk away. I'm in WAY over my head and scared to death. Look..I know I made a lot of knee jerk and less than thought out choices, but I can't undo my stupidity now, now I need to deal with the consequences. My husband can't help, he has no freakin' clue what to do at this point. If there is a super human out there with the awesome computer powers to fix this garbage, I'd love to hear from ya . PLEASE....I'm in seriously deep....

[TerryNet]

Not what you want to hear but all my votes go to ...

a. If the guy doesn't have his data backed up, and now decides that he wants it, copy it to removable media;

b. Format the disk (at least that partition);

c. Install (or Recover) Windows.

[heather1029]

Thanks, but we got it fixed...and that's exactly what we had to do was start from scratch. FYI though, if it matters to anyone, all the crap was caused by a virus that malware bytes and avg somehow didn't pick up on. So I put his hard drive in my machine, copied his data, and wiped and reloaded his machine. In the process of moving his stuff, my norton corporate informed me of said virus but it was too late and the damage was done...a fresh start was the best solution. Anywho, thanks for the reply.

Heather