Possible virus wiping out data on hard drive

[gbl]

I am trying to find a virus on a windows 98 computer. it has Trendmicro's Trend PC-Cillin 4.07, but I don't think the virus definitions have been updated recently.

The computer is a 550mhz pentium III, but is starting up slow. When I attempt to run the virus scanner it starts up slowly and a progress bar appears but after a short time the dialog box disappears.

Also the blue lightning icon that appears in the system tray disappeared when I hovered the mouse over it.

And during this time the amount of space indicated as used on the c drive declined from 2,302 megs to 2,227 megs.

The space problem seems to occur when I attempt to run the scan and I am wondering which virus this is.

Any ideas?
Thanks for the help.

 

[AVChap]

Probably not a virus. You said its an old system, right? Probably the HD is starting to show signs of failure. Might want to do a SCANDISK and DEFRAG of it.

HTH,
AVChap
... my $1 worth of advise, 2cents isn't enough due to inflation

 

[gbl]

Thanks for the suggestion, AVChap.
I was told that the problem started after someone sent this user an email and told her after that there was a virus in the email. The user deleted her mail but didn't think she had cleaned the computer.
After I made the last post I rebooted the computer and it was very very slow in restarting but also showed 2,223 megs instead of 2,227 megs when it finally came back up. I started word on this computer and while word was open the number of used bytes rose from 2,223 megs to 2,231 megs. I opened excel after this and the count of used bytes rose to 2,235 bytes.
Also see had a file called yak.exe in the startup folder. I moved this file out of startup and made sure the computer was set with msconfig to NOT load startup files. But upon restarting I found that the yak.exe file was back in the startup folder AND in the temporary folder I had moved it too.
I don't know if this yak.exe is a program or virus. I also found a file called vamt.exe, but don't know if this was a virus or not.
Any more thoughts?

 

[SESaskDFC]

Howdy:

Are you sure that was "Yak.exe" or could it have been "KAK.exe" ??

There is a "Kak" virii out there.. Suggest you go to

http://www.antivirus.com

and run their free online scanner.. Then, follow the removal instructions EXACTLY !!!

Murray

 

[gbl]

Well, I have run a rescue disk set on this computer with newer virus definition files and found both the bugbear virus and the Hooker trojan. Clean up time.