Microsoft Security Essentials Question

Factual Questions
1

First off, I run MS Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit SP2
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+

I recently installed the microsoft security essentials anti-virus program and so far it seems to be running fine, with one exception:

Speccy, under OS says anti-virus is disabled.

So I went to the mse forums and asked why it says that, and I was told that as long as there’s that little green castle thing in my tray, my system is protected, and not to pay any attention to what Speccy says.

Okay, fine.

So tonight I run Spybot (I run it daily along with the Malwarebyte program) and at the outset it tells me something like do I want to delete temp files not in use?

I always say “yes” and it ALWAYS comes back with “147 files in use and cannot be closed (or something similar).”

So I look this up in google, and one of the answers was that some of these files could be trojans, malware, etc…

So here’s the question: Would mse detect any virii present BEFORE it was installed and fix them, and is there a list of malicious stuff so that I can go down my list of temp files to see if they’re there so that I can delete them on my own?

Thanks

Q

2

Yes. I am not aware of any malware sophisticated enough to convincingly pretend to install the antivirus program you tried to install. Any viruses that muck with AV stuff invariably prevent new installations and disable running ones, usually with much wailing and gnashing of error messages.

That’d be a long-ass list to go through manually. In any case, I wouldn’t worry about temp files being in use; all sorts of programs (your browser, for instance) create temp files and hold onto them as a matter of course. That sort of message isn’t something that would concern me, but if you want to be extra-sure, just run a manual scan in MSE and see if it comes up with anything.

3

Thanks, BorgHunter,

I did just finish an mse full scan and it found 2 trojans and 5 exploitjava’s, so I set it to run “full” instead of “quick” scan from now on. Quick scan, since mse installation a week ago, didn’t catch this.

:slight_smile: and yeah, while I was waiting on the answer here, I did a search on malware, and saw where someone had written that there were millions of them! :slight_smile:

Thanks again!

Quasi