I’ve just fixed a badly infected computer system.

It was a celeron 466Mhz, with 256Mb ram & winXP (sp1).

Its not a blazingly fast system, but OK for what the owners need.

It had quite a lot of Malware on it, and my standard run of Antivir and Ewido (in safe mode) didn’t get rid of everything… OK, looks like I’ll need to do what everyone else says: run a few different anti-malware tools.

Some of the spyware found was: spywarequake, valueclick, vcodec, windows.security.internet.explorer

After the first round of removing malware, I upgraded to SP2.

I took this opportunity to closely evaluate spybot S&D and try a few combinations of tools.

I managed to clear everything by running Antivir, Ewido, and Spybot (with spybot and its teatimer monitor, I didn’t need to use winpatrol). All up, quite a lot of work!

I’ll need to try combining avg and spybot, as I don’t like the overlap of antivir & spybot (both will scan for malware), but the combination could cause conflicts.

I eventually had the system running with just antivir and spybot (with teatimer), and taught the customer to manually update Spybot and SpywareBlaster

These malware infections are starting to get more difficult to clear! Its becoming increasingly tempting (and cheaper) to just do a fresh reinstall of WinXP.