Rococo

I've had nothing but problems lately and I'm not sure if it's hardware, software or both. My computer has been crashing a lot lately, I went to the Housecall website and ran the program to find there was a worm. The program looked like it cleaned up the problem but I found another one again during a search today. I've done several searches and it looks like my system is clean, but how can I make sure? I was running norton antivirus which I have now uninstalled since the program obviously never detected these and therefore sucks shit.

When looking in event viewer I found many errors have been popping up lately including these ones:

"the parallel port driver service failed to start due to the following error: the service cannot be started....."

"the OMSCAN service failed to start due to the following error: the system cannot find the file"

"the WINS client service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time"

Any ideas on how to clean up these problems would be appreciated.

cliche

Are you sure you don't (still?) have the Welchia / Nachi worm? It adds 2 services to your computer, one of which is called "WINS client". Have a look in your WINNT\System32 directory - if there's a directory called "WINS" in there, containing 2 files (dllhost.exe and svchost.exe), you have the worm. Also, have a look at your services for:

Network Connections Sharing (rpctftpd)
WINS Client (rpcpatch)

There's loads of ways to get rid of it; search google or ask here.

Just a thought - when you mentioned crashing, worms, and "WINS client"...

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devnull

If this was in fact a worm that 'wormed' its way onto your computer, it will find ways to bury itself deep into your computer so that it can continue to propogate itself after a typical anti-virus may have attempted to clean it. From the sounds of it, it infected certain files on your computer that were probably not salvageable and these files were removed during the cleaning process. If this is the case, and they were files needed by Windows to run certain services, the only real way to fix it is to re-install XP.

If I can ask, what Anti-Virus scanning software have you used to clean your computer? Norton may have been doing a fine job, but if you weren't staying on top of keeping the Virus Definitions up-to-date, there's no way it could continue to do the proper job. This is the case for any anti-virus program you'll ever use.

I'd recommend the following programs to clean up your computer:

AVG Anti-Virus
Spybot Search & Destroy

cheerios

wow. ok #1: just because Norton missed something doesn't mean it's shit. have you updated the definitions at all? Worms and whatnot evolve all the time, and if you don't keep the definitions up to date, it can't help you.

#2: adaware(lavasoft) or spybot(I have no clue who makes this one), or another spyware removal program. get it, use it, love it. keep it updated.

#3: the damage may be done, and it may just be time to re-install.

So, readers digest version and moral:
UPDATE YOUR VIRUS DEFINITIONS!!!

if you don't want to pay to subscribe to Nortons, get McAfee, or look into a free one like PCillin

edit: http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=stinger check that out, too. a friend of mine who works in IT says it'll help clean up your system. she says "run it in safe mode!!" to get to safe mode hit F8 on boot.

Rococo

Thanks for all the info. I checked for updates at least once a week if not more. I was already fed up with the program adding all sorts of unwanted crap like recycle bin add-ons and who knows what else. I updated the program after Housecall found the virus (never deleted it) and norton still said my system was clean.

charliex

try AVG from http://www.grisoft.com i've found it to be less intrusive than norton, and it doesn't kill disk performance like norton does.

MontanaXVI

Nuff' Said and said well nuff

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