i use AVG free edition on all my pc's. so far so good. when i use to do co-op at a computer store i always found most of the computer that came in would either have out of date software or had expired licences. a simple update or replacing the expired software with avg free edition and most computers would be up and running great again after a complete system scan. now with some of the more stubborn virus's we would pull the hard drive and hook it up to our bench system and use nortons anti virus. i think nortons may work better but can slow down a computer a bit.

 

I have been running full scans....

Norton used to have a bad rep for being bad bloatware..... I would like to think they got over that.... I sell an awful lot of copies of it at work, and I don't get complaints that the machines are slower at any rate.....

RKill??

 

I won't go into too much detail, but Avast is OK, AVG blows, and Norton blows. No antivirus should cause as many problems or leave as much junk behind after uninstall as Norton does. The bank I work at uses Sophos, not because its the best (its mediocre), but because of its nice integration with Sophos encryption and Sopho's nice set of controls on the server for all the end-user systems.

If you must use a free antivirus, Microsoft Security Essentials is one of the best. If you want the absolute best and are willing to pay for them: Kaspersky or Bitdefender. I am currently experimenting with cloud-based antivirus, Webroot's SecureAnywhere. So far it seems to work quite well.

I am not trying to hurt anyone's feelings here, that is just the cumulation of years of research and personal experience. I worked at Best Buy and the Geek Squad for quite a while before getting my current position as IT support at a bank. Make fun of the Squad and BB all you want, you get a lot of experience very quickly with many, many kinds of viruses. AVG is the most common antivirus program to fail, and Norton-based systems (especially the Endpoint business-style ones) were the ones to have driver conflicts and/or blue screens of death the most often. The only reason AVG is as popular as it is: marketing. That and the fact that it was decent when it first came out, and free. Now it is not much better than nothing.

We sold a lot of Kaspersky and a lot of Trend Micro at Best Buy. Trend Micro systems sometimes came back with viruses... I can count on one hand how many times systems with Kaspersky came back in my entire time there. Bitdefender is just as good as Kaspersky, but cheaper. You just have to buy it online usually. Kaspersky is available in retail.

I'd better stop myself before I get to carried away, back to the problem at hand:

Just because the virus/trojan/worm/whatever is gone, doesn't mean that the changes it made aren't still there. It can be gone and changes it made still in effect, which would explain why everything says you are clean.

What browser are you using? If IE, did you check the proxy server settings to make sure they were set to "none"? Have you checked your hosts file?

 

Using firefox. Network settings are correct, and hosts file is clean. As far as I can tell, all settings are where they should be. (I lost count of the number of times they have been checked.....) Of all the solutions I have read on the net, combofix seems to be the one that is the magic bullet. Unfortunately, combofix isn't supported on XP 64 systems.....

 

Perhaps time to bit the bullet and wipe that drive clean! Got O.S Cd's or a restore partition?

I've seen so many virus' crap out the restore partition that using it to reload was useless, the old days of having a Windows Cd was the best way to get clean again or even just a "fresh" load......

 

Yep. Got the windows CD. Was considering 'upgrading' to win7.... but, don't have the 200 bucks for that kind of behavior......

Think i am going to try uninstalling/reinstalling firefox before taking on the nuclear option though.

 

Update: RKill didn't find anything.

 

Couldn't hurt.

I've been using Windows 7 for a while now, and I love it. I tried going back to XP on an older machine that didn't have video drivers for XP, but I just couldn't get used to XP again....

Good luck!

 

Agreed, Windows 7 is definitely the way to go if you can swing it. Skip the Vista if possible.

 

I have used Norton for the last 5 years and have never had a virus.

I also have Win7 64Bit and absolutely love it! It also has a file restore thing where you can restore a file to a previous version. I would not recommend Vista. My last laptop that had Vista had less than 50% of its 160GB HDD available because the Vista OS is so massive.