Customer thinks she has an instant messenger virus (her IM friends complain that she is sending them virus laden messages).

When I arrive, the PC is doing some strange things: Trend is currently scanning the PC (so I let it complete), but I also notice an avg icon on the desktop, as well as a few antispyware icons…

I assume that trend will do a good job (not a good assumption, but I have a “minimum impact” philosophy, so I won’t remove trend unless I have to).

The taskbar shows the quicklaunch, the start button, and the notification area, but it doesn’t show the running windows. This is annoying… as soon as I minimise a window, I need to use task manager to get it back…

Anyway, trend finds 6 infected files, but can only fix 5 of them. It says to resolve the issue, click on a particular link… and the link takes me to a help window, which tells me to disable certain services, and do a few other odd tasks. but they don’t fix a thing.

Since some of the trend windows have an “upgrade now” icon, I suspect that this is not the full trend security (or it has expired). Anyway, I gave trend its chance, and it didn’t work, So I uninstall it (as well as avg and any other antispyware software I’m not sure about), and I install antivir, spywareblaster, bhodemon, and winpatrol.

Antivir (once updated from the net), immediately detects some problem files… Just to be sure, I decide to run a scan from safe mode, and it detected many files (and the vundo trojan). While it was scanning, I disabled anything bad from starting in the registry, and told antivir to delete any “non removable files” when the PC restarted.

Since the scan was taking a very long time, I decided (after 3 hours) to leave, and ask the customer to allow the scan to complete, and then restart the PC, and then let me know if there are any further problems.

In the end, even after a scan from antivir, there were still 2 infected (or possibly re-infected) files…

I returned, removed the files by booting ubcd4win, removing the guilty dll files, and then no more infections were found…

However, the problem about minimised windows disappearing remained.

At this point, I decided a repair install of windows was the only option left…

So I did a repair install, updated to SP2, run autopatcher, get all the latest patches… but I still cannot see minimised windows!

I really don’t want to do a clean install, so I do a careful search on the net, and turn up a brilliant little utility called TaskBar Repair Tool Plus!

With TBRTP, I quickly had the application buttons visible again.