I’m almost completely computer illiterate and wanted to remain that way. I was out of town and my step-daughter used my computer for a week. Bad idea, apparently. When I first turned it on when I came back, there was an error message about not being able to locate the MAIN: file not located. It finished booting up and when I went on line, I had dozen’s of pop-up ads. I didn’t have any before I left. I got an error message that said it was #11. I opened email which works fine, but when I tried to open the explorer, I got “Explorer has caused an error in MSVBVM60.DLL, Explorer will now close.” I went into the history and found all sorts of new things loaded, mostly to do with videos and MP3 stuff, also Gator, pretty pictures and some sort of video program was loaded 8 times, but looked like she kept stopping it or something. I tried the restore option, but none of the previous dates worked. I tried to do a “clean boot” and wasn’t able to. I read that this can have to do with a damaged registry, but haven’t a clue what to do there. I went in and deleted the files that were obviously hers(hopefully) and stopped getting the “Main” error and the #11 one. The MSVB one is still causing problems. It seems worse if I am running any other program and try to use explorer. Sometimes it works and mostly it doesn’t. It takes me between 5 and 10 tries to make it online, but the Outlook Express doesn’t have any problem receiving email. Oddly enough my Help screen seems to be non-functional. Oh, and stupidly my virus protection software had just expired. Any ideas, anyone?
Sounds like the little darling got you infected with a bunch of adware and spyware. Get yourself a free copy of AdAware and Spybot Search & Destroy (don’t forget to have each program check for updates), and clean all the spyware off your computer. Then use SpywareBlaster to block over 1000 different flavors of spyware.
When you are able to make it out onto the internet, do a google search for “adaware”, and follow the links to the download.
AdAware is a spyware tracking utility that will scan your hard drive and locate/delete the stuff your step-daughter downloaded.
No purchase is required for the shareware version
Good Luck
Also, on the off chance that you also have a virus infection, the free AVG scanner & protection program from Grisoft will locate and clean any virusses that she contracted for you.
I will 2nd and 3rd the spyware links mentioned above. Install them and make sure you run them regularly. Also get the latest updates available.
The msvbvm60.dll error seems to related to Visual Basic runtime machine. My guess is that it may be corrupt and need replacement. Here is a Google Search link. Check out the 3rd item from the top. I just cleaned by brothers computer of mucho spyware with these programs. There are lots of popup blockers on the market. They are a must these days if you use IE. Good Luck and let us know if you are successful.
Thank you so much for your help!!! I’ve only run Spybot so far. I got rid of about 60 files, the only one’s I kept were about 10 called BACKWEB because it’s been there since we got the computer and I wasn’t sure if other programs depended on it? Anyway, no more crashing and no more pop-up ads. Is it necessary to download the other two programs since it seems to be fixed? Again, thanks!!
It’s a good idea to run Adaware and Spybot S&D in conjunction with each other. Each catches spyware/adware/malware that the other misses.
Spywareblaster is preventative program that innoculates your system against the installation of hundreds of variations of spyware. Run it to prevent the nastiness from being installed on your computer in the first place.
Also, I heartily second the recommendation of AVG Antivirus as an excellent free virus scanner.
All of the above programs should be updated and run often. Sadly, the good guys are fighting a neverending rear-guard action against those who would corrupt our computers for their own nefarious uses.