I’ve run (an updated) McAfee (and Spybot and AdAware) several times the past month, and McAfee keeps coming up with five “infected” files of unknown seriousness. All are executables located in this general area:
C:\WINNT\System32\dllcache…
The suspects are:
Delshare
PrcView
Hide Windows
Remote Process Launch
Remote Process Launch
McAfee is unable to delete or clean the files, so I’ve decided to quarantine them.
Any advice of what to do next would be great. Sometimes my PC’s hard drive just grinds away for no reason at all. I’m very concerned.
It sounds like McAfee removed some suspicious programs but remnants of them are stuck in Windows’ cache of protected system files. You can clear it out by typing sfc /purgecache from the command prompt. You may then be prompted for your Windows CD.
There’s a full description of the sfc command in this KB article.
Another tactic to try is assuming that you don’t know if these files are really necessary for anything you use, create another folder in that folder named"contained" or something, and move all the suspect files into it. If anything useful stops working, you should get some kind of error message and then you can just move any required files back out.
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First, does McAfee name the virus responsible for the infection? If you know the virus or trojan you can look up McAfee’s of Symantec’s Web site for instructions on removing it.
If you’re already infected by a virus, you normally can’t get rid of it in normal mode. Many viruses are designed so that Windows thinks it they are essential processes and will prevent access. Even if you manage to kill the process and remove infected files, the virus will likely be there after a reboot.
Norton (Symantec) and McAfee have various free utilities to get rid of specific viruses. Find the name and do a search. Expect to be told to reboot in “Safe Mode” tu run the utility.
Since some viruses can do much harm, there is reason to be concerned…