ms installer is dead, because of virus. What to do?

[Sandzzz]

Hi guys!

I just ran out of my trial for the Kaspersky Antivirus and the very first moment after uninstalling the KAV my PC fell terribly ill. windows explorer has gone mad, doing all kinds of bizzare stuff, no address bar, even though it is marked as being displayed, all start menu items are shown like they are dead links - IT'S TERRIBLE, no folder changes are saved etc. etc. etc. I tried reinstalling the KAV but it keeps saying that my ms installer is inactive, either because I run my XP in safe mode (which is BS) or because the service is shut down (I have opened the services and didn't find one that was called ms installer), so it refused to install. Then I downloaded the completely USELESS AVG antivirus and ran a full 3 hour computer scan only to get 10 tracking cookies as scanning result. Laughable software. Really bad. Imagine running your AVG antivirus and at the same time every time you open a folder getting dialog boxes saying your PC is horribly infected and click on the free-antivirus . com or smth. like that to download the software that removes the f crap.
Then I downloaded Bitdefender and I had the same problem with the installer not working.
WHAT SHOULD I DO to find and kill both the virus and MF who created it?
Please people, help with this problem.

Thank you so much!

 

[wahnula]

Assuming you can get to the Internet, try TrendMicro's Housecall

It might not be virus-related. Put your XP CD in the tray and Start==>Run==>sfc /scannow to replace any missing Windows files. If no luck then perhaps a post in forum779 might be more rewarding.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[captaingadget]

I've recently had something very similar which took a great deal of time to fix. I believe the software which really did the trick for me was STOPZILLA. It's free to download and run but if it finds stuff you will need to purchase the license ($40), to get rid of it. Well worth the money in my case. It got rid of loads of stuff including CUTWAILROOTKIT and the WINCTRL32.DLL which other software detected but was unable to delete.

 

[2ffat]

Cross posted in thread779-1483776. See suggestions there.


James P. Cottingham
-----------------------------------------
^{I'm number 1,229!
I'm number 1,229!}

 

[wahnula]

Thanks 2ffat. Cross-posting is so annoying!!! Harder to help when there's another dialog going on.

Tony

Users helping Users...