A customer calls, saying he ran spy sweeper, and it found some spyware infecting his system. He got spysweeper to remove the infections.

He was then prompted to restart his laptop, and now he gets: windows starts (mostly),  but eventually complains about a corrupt or missing msgina.dll … This seems to happen after the GUI has started, as he can move his mouse pointer for a few seconds before getting the errors, and then having to reboot.

The best I can do, is start BartPE, and notice that the file is still there (but probably corrupted).

He doesn’t mind if windows gets reinstalled, as long as I backup ‘my documents’ first.

So I take the computer away, backup “my documents” by connecting the laptop HDD to my main PC.

While the HDD is connected, I do a scan, and find lots of spyware files. I also run ewido and find further infections.

Once cleaned, I put the HDD back into the laptop, and do a repair install of XP. It all goes well, and once I’m back into windows, I do a few more scans, and remove a few more infections (mostly registry-based).

I also install antivir, spywareblaster, and winpatrol, do all the latest windows updates, clean out all the temp areas & do a defrag…then return a much improved laptop to its owner.