Derwood

Here's the story:

My Dad just bought a brand new Dell desktop. He was complaining to me that it was running slow, so I went over to take a look. I got rid of a bunch of stuff from his Startup routines (via msconfig) but it was only marginally faster. It would still take the Control Panel 15 seconds to open up, etc. (on a 2.33 GHz, 256 MBRAM machine). Something wasnt' right.

I ran spyware and adware programs and turned up little. So I went into the Ctl+Alt+Del screen to see what was running.

There were something like 47 processes running. Many involved AOL and his printer and digital camera. But several were gibberish and were listed under SYSTEM instead of his username. I went to iamnotageek.com to check them out and about 6 came up as really bad files (most were .exe files that the site said were introduced by a trojan or a worm).

I immediately ran a virus scan but it turned up nothing. So the question is, how do I get rid of these files? Is the computer already screwed? And where would he have gotten these from? He has a virus scanner and a firewall running all the time, and isn't online most of the time (he's still on dialup).

Sorry for the long post, but I want to help him clear up the problem.

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"You can't shoot a country until it becomes a democracy." - Willravel