A bunch of my friends have made it clear via facebook that they've had serious virus issues this month. I did as well, but I'd like to share how I cleaned it up.
I should also mention that I didn't catch the virus early, so it was tricky to weed out since my lovely boyfriend just clicked which ever buttons looked remotely helpful.
I began by downloading Spyware Doctor from my roommate's computer.
This is an important step, the application has to be run from a USB device, and probably you'll need to right-click and select "Run as Administrator"
Now, Spyware Doctor is not exactly free - but it will run with the Vista/Windows 7 Internet Security bull$&@% going on, and allow for some other applications to run.
It is not really a required step, though it was helpful. The program that really did the job was SUPERanti Spyware
Run this off a USB as Administrator also, it should clean out nearly everything your computer has caught. The downside is that you need to restart the computer after every time you empty the virus vault, and my laptop was very very slow while infected.
The virus was so bad on my computer that the registry/file extension associations were damaged. This is pretty bad but I found a great spot to fix it HERE
Again, run from a USB. It may work without the USB but why go through the hassle of finding out it wont? I found #3 to be the most helpful. It will correct everything, though you may need another reboot to have all the changes apply.
Finally, I started AVG up and basically just followed its prompts. One of which was a one-time-only but free "Tune-Up" this took out all remaining issues, and here we are.
I hope this is helpful to some of you!
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