I am sorry if this is both trivial and perhaps dealt with before, but I am stuck.
A colleague brought his home PC in to work, saying it had problems, kept rebooting etc… typical Sasser-infection symptoms in fact. I thought to myself, no problem, I’ll clean that right up in a jiffy… but…
I followed the instructions:
- Enabled the XP firewall
- Used the MS Sasser removal tool, it confirmed that it was infected and removed the infection.
- Used Windows update to install all patches
- Installed AVG antivirus, updated the virus definitions and scanned… 49 instances of the Sasser virus… removed them all.
- Rescanned… clean, no infection.
- Checked with the Sasser removal tool, yep, no infection now.
So far so good… but…
a) Every time I scan for available updates on the Windows update site the same 8 critical updates are re-listed. Included is update 835732 which blocks the Sasser virus. I install them, and everything seems to go OK, but, each time I reboot and scan, they are listed there again.
b) I can’t get any of the online virus searches to run, Trend Housecall, Symantec, McAffee… they all fail with various ActiveX-type errors, despite me doing everything I can think of to make sure IE is set up correctly (Firewall Off, ActiveX enabled, Scripting enabled etc)
c) Norton AntiVirus won’t run… I have uninstalled and reinstalled but it just flashes up it’s splash screen and disappears.
I am suspicious, and think there may still be some virus on the PC… does anyone agree? Or have any ideas why the Windows updates won’t ‘stick’? There are no suspicious processes running that I can see in task manager.
I shall persevere, but if anyone can save me time, I would be grateful.
His PC is a Dell 2400, Windows XP Home, dialup internet access. His version of NAV is NAV 2003.