Problems, Problems. Please Help!

Hi.

Yesterday, whilst using my PC on the net, suddenly a supposedly free online virus scanner popped up on screen and started what appeared to be a scan or download all by itself. Whilst I fought to stop it, strongly suspecting it to be malware of some description, it continued to scan/download, and nothing I clicked on seemed to stop it. In a last ditch attempt to kill the beast, I pulled the plug on my internet connection.

I then proceeded to scan my PC using AVG anti-virus and Spybot, both of which found various threats including adware and a trojan downloader. These threats were either destroyed or quarantined/destroyed.

According to further scans, the PC is now clean.

Problem is, the PC now seems to be running as if it's got concrete blocks tied around its ankles! When booting it takes about (literally) 20 minutes to load all my desktop icons/shortcuts, and when eventually up and running it frequently freezes, or just fails to open programs. During this time, my onscreen display showing details of HDD/Processor/RAM functionality, appears to show HDD activity at 100%, or Processor activity at 100%, as though some unknown process is causing a severe bottleneck.

It may also be worth mentioning that since this attack, I am also having email receipt problems, but have asked about this in the appropriate section of this forum.

Can anyone shed any light on what might be the problem?

Basically, what is my next move?

 

For now, just try a System Restore.

Start > run: msconfig > Launch System Restore and choose a date prior to the problem.

Run your antivirus scans again, after the restore and let them clean what ever may have been lurking.

Normally these fake scanners do not actually do anything unless you give them permission and what you might see happening is entirely bogus.

However if you have an unpatched system it's possible they could do something using an exploit.

>> by unplugging the computer you may have caused some registry or file system damage. The IDE controllers may also have degraded in performance.

For this latter issue I think the restore will fix it -- but if it doesn't, try this:

http://winhlp.com/node/10

download the script on the first line; make sure you see it as a .vbs type file before running it. Use the right click "save target as" method to download.