Bone head restore point question.

I am running Vista (32 bit I think) and managed last week to pick up a nasty bug.

AVG failed to find it, while Spybot and AdAware were able to find some things, it still didn’t help.

I rebooted into safe mode, and reloaded to a restore point that pre-dated all this mess.

SpyBot, AdAware and MalWareBytes are all coming up clean now. Is it safe to assume that I’m clean?

Thanks for the advice, oh masters of the digital Domain…

(One of the reasons I love my AS/400 so much. very little of this sort of thing to deal with. lol)

I would say it is. I take it your three apps are up-to-date with their virus/adware definition files?

You are probably clean but the only way to be sure is to run a sniff on your your pits and sockets. I admire you for having an AS/400 at home. Few people do. They are solid as a rock although a little pricey. I don’t know why people always break it down into a binary PC/Mac debate. I have posted to this board from a main-frame.

… now that I think about it, I wonder if I could connect to the dope via the AS/400. Sadly, it’s at work, rather than home. I have seen boxes in garages and stuff, and it would be nifty as all get out to setup a home system. You know, for heavy batch processing. heheh

Yep, all 3 were freshly updated as soon as I got the restore done, and run.

I am quite relieved. Thank you for the reassurance.

You are probably clean.

Restore is great when it works. Unfortunately, many of the nastier bugs will impair the restore function as a defense. I’ve not encountered one that “faked” a restore though.

Yeah Kevbo, I had to go into safe mode to get the restore to work. Restore, Task Manager, and the AVG interface all stopped working when booted normally, as well as IE and Firefox. Lame!

All is working now, so I’m a happy camper.

The only way to confirm that you are clean is to run HijackThis and post your logs to an expert forum.

Instructions here (Step 7):
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=538187

I know nothing about this subject . . . but gave up trying to parse the thread title.

IMO, when you bought Vista, you picked a nasty bug.