Weird possible virus issue

Factual Questions
1

I recently worked on a customer machine, I backed up all of her docs and reloaded windows XP.

Customer complaint was “very slow”

Color me shocked, running vista home premium on a 1.1ghz p4 laptop with 512M of ram. The answer, roll this bad boy back to XP home where it came from.

Didn’t bother to doublecheck the doc file folders, they copied with no error messages.

Customer calls back about a week later saying that many of her files do not work :eek:

I go out an hundreds of the have had the file extension .bis added to the end of them.

like Alaska1.jpg.bis

I used a bulk rename utility to drop the .bis and many of them went back to working but many still do not seem to work (50-60).

I want to help her out here but I am stumped. If I had some idea of a cause maybe I could look for a solution.

I have seen 1 mention of this here but no apparent followup. Any doper IT gurus have any insight or analysis on this.

2

Any chance they were using the program BeInSynch to synch files between two computers?

That uses the extention .bis as placeholders for files yet to be synched.

http://beinsync.helpserve.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=44&nav=0,23

If so, you’ll probably find the full files on whatever the other computer was.

3

Unlikely but I will doublecheck, are there any other backup or synch utilities anyone has heard of that might use the BeInSynch engine.

4

Nothing like that on the machine… it was just recently reloaded clean.

Obviously from the link I am not the first person to see this, but it sounds like a might rare error.