Ick..no fun. Viruses are nasty buggers to get rid of once you have them.
I had written a big long post in response to this thread a few days ago with advice on what to try & whatnot, but I got auto-logged out of the forum before I hit the post button and lost everything I wrote.
A couple of things I included in the post as a sidenote though were that if anyone needs a free virus scanner to check out avast! at
www.avast.com. It is free for home computer use.
Trend Micro also has what is called "housecall" which is a free-to-use over-the-internet virus scanner. Just go to
www.trendmicro.com then find the link to housecall from there. It is, of course, always better to have virus detection installed on your machine though rather than relying on something like housecall.
A few tips to anyone who gets infectedby a virus:
1) For viruses that cause pop-ups:
disable your internet connection, then open internet explorer, click tools>internet options
go to the programs tab, and click on the manage add-ons button
disable all add-ons, including browser-helper objects
MAKE SURE YOU HIT THE APPLY BUTTON
click OK
close internet explorer, then re-activate your internet connection
Doing the above steps can disable some viruses that hide as internet explorer add-ons and cause pop-ups, which can also give a virus scanner the ability to remove some viruses that otherwise could not be removed because they were in use.
2) press CTRL+ALT+DEL or CTRL+SHIFT+ESC to open task manager. Click the processes tab. Look for any files in use under the
username that you do not recognize. If you see some that you do not recognize, click the process and click end task, then click yes to the warning box. (DO NOT end SYSTEM tasks unless you absolutely know exactly what you're terminating; doing so can cause instability if the wrong processes are disabled)
3) If you're browsing the web and something starts downloading on your computer automatically, disable your internet connection by right clicking on it in the system tray, and selecting disable. Sometimes it is possible to stop the download before it completes this way.
4) Make sure your security settings for internet explorer's internet zone are always at least as strong as the default settings for that zone. Internet explorer>tools>internet options>security tab>internet zone>default (or higher if you wish, though setting the security too high will limit functionality)
5) I know nobody trusts Microsoft much, but...they do have a really handy little tool called the windows malicious software removal tool that actually does work most of the time if your windows machine gets infected by a virus. It can remove a lot of viruses that some virus scanners can't touch. It can be downloaded from the microsoft website.