Virus or not a virus?

I have an NC8000 HP/Compaq business notebook running XP SP3.

I have a symptom that makes me concerned I may have a virus on my laptop. However, I have run scans using the latest AVG 7.5 virus database as well as the Microsoft web based One Care Protection app. Both of these report no issues.

The symptom that repeatedly and seemingly randomly occurs is a text balloon in my system tray notifying me that my USB device is not recognized. This seems very virus-like.

I recently installed WinXP SP3 but I'm not sure if there's any correlation there or just coincidence.

In case it was a virus I decided to reinstall my WinXP on my C partition leaving my D partition alone. Unfortunately the same symptom is back.

Other than irritation the symptom hasn't manifested into any noticable damage.

A few weeks ago I did find a virus on my laptop but most of the articles I googled said AVG reports a false positive on this virus and it's nothing. I wish I could remember the name of the virus is identified. I think I deleted the file that was said to be infected. I think the file was survey.exe which I did not create.

Can anyone provide a suggestion?

I guess I could back up my 30 GB D: partition onto DVD, wipe the entire disk clean and reinstall the OS and then the data from DVD. But I would be reluctant to reinstall the DVD data in case it contained the virus that seems to be missed by my scans to date.

Thoughts? Ideas?

Brian

 

Try all of the online scanners listed in the forum sticky 'Security Help Tools'. AVG's detection rate is low. Don't know about MS's product.