TnT Computer Service of Northeast Tennessee, Virus and Spyware Removal

Virus
Information about real and hoax virus threats here

Everyone has heard about computer viruses and they are a big problem because they are written to spread through email or even from some web pages. The problem comes in when your anti virus software is not up to date so you don't even know. There is one free for personal use piece of software that I recommend AVG Antivirus.	GRISOFT AVG Technologies released AVG Anti-Virus Free 8.0 on 24th April 2008, the latest version of the company's popular and widely-used free security software, which now incorporates protection against spyware through a new combined antivirus and antispyware engine.
A few years ago a virus was normally passed around on a floppy disk. But with so many people using email now it is becoming a bigger problem than ever. The first suggestion I would make is if you don't know the person sending the email...question it. It's a good idea not to open attachments especially from someone you don't know. If you use anti-virus software (you should) keep it updated (I update almost daily) and save any attachment to a temp directory and scan it before you ever open it. One of the problems with most email software now is that you can't even delete an email without the code running (you click on it to delete it and the virus tries to run). Your software should look at any file and not allow it to open if it contains a virus.	Even if the email comes from a name you know be careful because a virus will sometimes fake a from address. The thing to watch for there is "does it sound like the person?". I have recieved emails that seemed to be from someone I knew but it just didn't look like the way they would express themselves so I checked the attachment and sure enough it had a virus. It is a good idea to do an online virus scan once in awhile. There is one program that catches almost everything. The online scan I use is Trend Micro
Windows XP Over the weekend Sept. 8 2008 while working on a machine I ran spybot. It found some adware called Zango. Spybot said it had to reboot to remove some of it and that is where the problem starts. When it reboots you will see "c:\windows\system32\command.com The parameter is incorrect." Clicking it keeps reporting error message over and over. The system never really goes beyond that point. Took a little research but here is how I corrected it Log on to the system in safe mode. Start regedit. Navigate to the following registry key and see if there is an entry with "c:\windows\system32\command.com ..." in the data portion of the entry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\RunOnce It had several entries to run Spybot and remove things so I deleted those entries and restarted the machine. Ran Spybot again and undid the changes to that section and it seemed to work fine. I didn't do it because it wasn't my machine but they say you can remove it instructions here.	Windows XP Pro Worked on a machine that wouldn't boot up. The message it gave was "A problem is preventing windows from accyrately checking the license for this computer. Error Code:0x80040017" My first thought was a virus or malware but since I couldn't log into the machine I managed to log into safe mode and did a system restore to about 10 days earlier, that didn't work so I tried a different restore point and that didn't work either so I started searching the internet and trying all the different things I found. None of that worked. I had read some posts by people who ran chkdsk /r and it solved their problem so I tried that, found problems and corrected them still had same problem. Ran defrag and chkdsk again. Booted into windows normally and thought I had it till it gave me the blue sceen we all hate to see, tried booting into safe mode and it just froze and wouldn't do anything. Turned it off and back on and it ran chkdsk on it's own and found some more problems (some of which were in the restore folder) after which it still gave me the original error. Went back into safe mode and picked a different restore point again and it worked this time. Scanned for Malware and fixed problems then did a deep scan for malware and fixed those problems. From this point it would be a matter of making sure there are no other malware items, viruses or spyware but the machine seems to be fine now.

Windows XP

Windows XP Pro