I think my computer has a virus that my software can't take care of.?

Question

I believe my computer has a virus that is affecting some things on my desktop tool bar. I ran my antivirus software (ESET NOD32) and it found one threat and says it took care of it, but i am still experiencing problems with my desktop tool bar. I tried running system restore but this is a new computer and hasn't created any restore points... any suggestions

Answer 1

Sometimes you are unable to clean or delete a virus. It is because the virus is running. It is like when you open a Microsoft Word file, you cannot delete or rename it. Then, you can enter the safe mode, where the virus is not running, to delete the virus.

However, if you find that some infected files cannot be deleted even in the safe mode, they are probably zipped files. By default, NOD32 does not delete infected zipped files. You can make some changes to the settings and let NOD32 delete infected zipped files automatically, for more details you can refer to http://www.nod32.com.sg/html/176/328/

Answer 2

It's not your anti-virus as NOD32 is the best. You need to run it in Safe Mode (tap F8 as the computer boots up and choose to boot to safe mode).

Ideally you should run a virus removal program in Safe Mode (without networking) and reboot and repeat the scan and reboot until there is a cycle where no virus is detected.

The idea behind the Safe Mode is that the operating system would only load your essential programs and drivers to the memory and hence there is a “high” chance that the virus-infected file is on the drive but not loaded into memory. This would enable the AV to clean it easily and the next reboot/scan would detect nothing. There could still be a small possibility that one of the drivers or programs that are loaded by the OS in the Safe Mode is infected. That’s why you need to keep rebooting and rescanning to make sure you’ve found them all.

Answer 3

Turn off and delete system restore points. Boot into the PC using a live CD (Knoppix, Ubuntu, whatever you want) and manually clean the PC of viruses while windows isn't running. Reboot into windows.