After virus, things are ... weird (PC Help)

hamdingers

Ok so the wife reported to me that her PC (Vista) was hit by at least one virus. So we added Avast first, then Norton 2011 and did a full scan - lots of stuff was removed. I should have checked and made a list of what was noted - I didn't and that was dumb.

Following all this, tried to use the browsers and they all reported various timeout/proxy issues. I checked my LAN settings and I was set to proxy to 127.0.0.1. I removed this and just put automatically detect settings.

Current state:

Internet IPs: pingable, both by address and hostname
Browsers: just time out
127.0.0.1: NOT pingable (!!) which is weird to me. The virus may have bound it to something odd, but I don't know how to check that.

Help?

Aurin

Sounds like a rootkit. Which means that it's likely just simpler to nuke it from orbit (reformat) because the computer will likely never run the same way it did before, again.

Rootkits generally do just what you describe. Either they kill your net access completely, or they just redirect every attempt at searching to their malware and virus-infested pages.

TychoCelchuuu

We could walk you through all the various solutions until you finally fix whatever symptoms you're experiencing but really you're just going to want to reformat and reinstall because it's extremely unlikely that this system will ever be clean.

Buttcleft

reformat the computer, making sure to nuke the mbr, sometimes things like to hide there.

reintall, update, install antivirus, then if you have a second harddrive/partition, scan that extensively before using anything on it.

Then change all your passwords.