^^^And this (free) program will eliminate a lot of the more difficult viruses and bad stuff that may have been installed on your computer: MalwareBytes (http://www.malwarebytes.org/) I use it regularly to scan my PC just in case something may have sneaked by.

 

Yep - I've actually seen it outperform the current Symantec corporate product (EndPoint) on several infections - even though the Symantec client was running real time protection.

 

Hello-

I was nailed by that virus last year. I acquired it searching for a Civic repair manual for my Nephew through Google to diagnose a transmission problem he had.

It took me hours of research / work to finally rid myself of it. Standard McAffey (sp) Anti-Virus can't find or clean it. The malware link above was what finally cleaned it for me.

One other word of advice -> create a Windows account that has no installation / modification privelage. Use that account anytime you are surfing. While this may not be bulletproof, it should help.

Good luck!

 

Technically these aren't viruses - they're malware. But your advice about restricted accounts is spot on. That's the best base defense.

 

I recently got hit by the "Vista Anti-Virus 2012" malware. Any program I tried to open (Firefox, Notepad, Windows Media Player) popped up a window such as "Notepad is infected with XXXXX virus..."

I removed the CAT-5 cable to disconnect from the Internet. I was not successful with an attempt to restore because I'd had a problem creating the restore disk and never worked through that.

I found that I could run my ESET virus protection software by right-clicking on the program and then selecting "Run as Administrator." The first whole-machine scan took 13+ hours (because of the periodic popups informing me that my computer was infected) but it did remove one file. After a new virus .dat download, I ran another whole-machine scan that found zero infected files and completed in about 3 hours.

I do have one lingering issue: if I double-click on an icon for one of the programs that I tried to run during the infection, it asks me to select a program to open the file with. If I right-click the icon and select Start then it works fine. One of these days I'll investigate that issue; I suspect it requires I use regedit, but I haven't bothered yet.

 

That's probably one of two issues. Either the desktop icon pointers have been corrupted or the file association for .exe files has been removed. The fix depends on which flavor of Windows you're using.

 

I use Trend Micro Titanium. So far its working for me.