Virus / Spyware disabling microsoft security essentials

Question

Possible Duplicate:
What to do if my computer is infected by a virus or a malware?

I have cleaned up some viruses and trojans and spyware from my machine using spybot.

The trouble is that all the problems have not been solved. No sooner do I start Microsoft Security Essentians than it shuts downs. It is of no use now to my computer.

The security centre service also disables itself soon after I enable it.

I have scanned with AVG Free-Edition (which picked up nothing even when the initial infections were present!), spybot (which picked up the initial malware), and spyware terminator. Cannot seem to fix it.

Answer 1

I'd abandon ship. There is no telling what else is on your machine. You could have rootkits, which are sometimes impossible for an general purpose antivirus to detect.

Best bet is do an upgrade install over your current installation.

Just grab your setup DVD. Put it in while you are inside Windows. Fire up install and select the upgrade option

Answer 2

surfasb essentially has the right idea. Once you have one virus, it's already downloaded all its virus friends and they download updates to avoid virus scanners.

You can try to remove the viruses but you'll never know if you really got rid of all of them or if there are still some malicious settings left over.

The best way to know there are no more viruses is to reinstall.

If you still want to try to remove the viruses, you can try this:

There is some pretty good information here that you can try.

short version:

Leave the computer disconnected from the internet for a week to keep the viruses from updating. Take the infected hard drive out of the computer and hooked it up to a known good computer as a secondary drive. Update virus definitions on your clean system and scan the infected hard drive. Most antivirus products have an option to do a custom scan which would let you just scan the attached (infected) drive.

I've had good luck with SuperAntiSpyware. There is a free version. Worth a shot. The more antivirus programs you scan with, the better.

Stick the previously infected drive back in the computer, re-install antivirus (it might have been crippled). Make sure you have all the latest windows updates and service packs.