On Sunday, Norton Antivirus indicated that I had the "bloodhound.exploit.33" virus on my computer, that it was unable to clean it up. I ran Norton immediately, and it found nothing. I've been having loads of problems with Norton's "Live Update" lately, so I eventually was able to manually update it (after a few days), and it still hasn't found anything. I have also tried AVG's free virus scanner, as well as McAfee, and none of them have gotten it.
Symantec seems to be the only virus software database that I can find that mentions this virus (that I know of...). I've looked in the databases of other virus softwares like AVG and McAfee, and neither of them list it. All reports say that this is not a very malicious virus, but what the reported effects are do not exactly match up with my symptoms. Symantec suggests this affects MSN Messenger, which I don't use (and I think I long ago deleted from my hard drive), while for me IE and any internet activity has been horrendous.
What it has been doing is making IE run very slow, if at all. It can sometimes take 10 min to load a webpage, and often I will have to give up and refresh, and it will take an unreasonable amount of time. Also, accessing "secure sites" has been a problem, particulalry for Gmail (haven't gotten into that account in days). Although I was having problems accessing my Hotmail account at first, I am able to do so now with only the slowness issue. The funniest thing is that the IE problems are sporadic. Although it is consistently slow, sometimes it is slower than others, and this does not seem to be a related to any problems with my internet connection. I have also experienced problems when Windows was loading a few times, where it would take 2-3 min to load from where I clicked my name as administrator to actually showing the desktop (i.e. not loading all the tray icons and starting up the processes).
My roommate has also gotten this virus, and additional damage was done. He cannot download anything (I had been having problems downloading, but more than anything it was that it was inordinately slow and would stall frequently), and many of his .dll files have been corrupted. He only had the free version of AVG on his computer.
If anyone has any suggestions on how to get rid of this virus, please help me! Apart from the annoyance, I don't know what internal damage it is doing to either of our systems that is going undetected. My system is running on Windows XP Home Edition, Service Pack 2, and I think my roommate has XP Professional. Below is the file where Norton intially located the virus, although subsequent searches for this file have proved useless:
C:\Documents and Settings\Emily\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\MHBGT872\6031-Eyes.gif.30394.1[1].gif
Thanks for your help.
Symantec seems to be the only virus software database that I can find that mentions this virus (that I know of...). I've looked in the databases of other virus softwares like AVG and McAfee, and neither of them list it. All reports say that this is not a very malicious virus, but what the reported effects are do not exactly match up with my symptoms. Symantec suggests this affects MSN Messenger, which I don't use (and I think I long ago deleted from my hard drive), while for me IE and any internet activity has been horrendous.
What it has been doing is making IE run very slow, if at all. It can sometimes take 10 min to load a webpage, and often I will have to give up and refresh, and it will take an unreasonable amount of time. Also, accessing "secure sites" has been a problem, particulalry for Gmail (haven't gotten into that account in days). Although I was having problems accessing my Hotmail account at first, I am able to do so now with only the slowness issue. The funniest thing is that the IE problems are sporadic. Although it is consistently slow, sometimes it is slower than others, and this does not seem to be a related to any problems with my internet connection. I have also experienced problems when Windows was loading a few times, where it would take 2-3 min to load from where I clicked my name as administrator to actually showing the desktop (i.e. not loading all the tray icons and starting up the processes).
My roommate has also gotten this virus, and additional damage was done. He cannot download anything (I had been having problems downloading, but more than anything it was that it was inordinately slow and would stall frequently), and many of his .dll files have been corrupted. He only had the free version of AVG on his computer.
If anyone has any suggestions on how to get rid of this virus, please help me! Apart from the annoyance, I don't know what internal damage it is doing to either of our systems that is going undetected. My system is running on Windows XP Home Edition, Service Pack 2, and I think my roommate has XP Professional. Below is the file where Norton intially located the virus, although subsequent searches for this file have proved useless:
C:\Documents and Settings\Emily\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\MHBGT872\6031-Eyes.gif.30394.1[1].gif
Thanks for your help.