Help - very scared

[CAT11]

Hi,

I hope this doesn't get posted twice because I attempted to post this and then it didn't show up on the board so I am going to attempt it again.

I want to preface this by saying that I am a novice at all of this...

I started to have a problem on Friday - at first I wasn't sure what was happening but I discovered that something started hijacking my search engines. I would search for something on Google or Bing and it would re-direct to another website multiple websites). I did a scan using IObit Security 360 and it found a bunch of Trojan Horses which I erased.

When I tried to shut down my computer a box opened that said that Daemon Spy was not responding and did I want to end now. I also had another window that said jucheck.exe wasn't responding.

I went to CNET and downloaded ACE Utilities v5.1.0 32 bit.

It took a long time to download (I'm on dial up) and I went through all of the steps in Cleanup, Optimize, Protect and Miscellaneous except the "Schedule System Maintenance".

I restarted my computer and my entire desktop was gone except for the wallpaper. All of my icons, start button, task tray, etc.. were gone. I had to open the task manager and browse to find ACE Utilities and do a restore to get my desktop back. But, everytime I shut down or restart it all disappears, again.

I need to fix this so that I can then try to figure out what is going on with the hijacking. (I noticed that I have something called ctfmon.exe listed on my system and one site said that that could be linked with something called SOCKS-E Worm???)

I also keep having a window open up that says that AVX.exe is encountering a problem. That didn't start until after the desktop started disappearing.

I hope someone can help me with this because I have been trying to do it myself for days

I am using Windows XP Pro v5.1 service pack 3.

Thanks,
Christine

[Aneesh]

It seems like your pc has been infected with a spyware(s) and/or other similar malicious program. Hijacking the web-browser, unexpected popups, odd pc behaviour etc. are typical symptoms of this. You need to scan your hard disk using a good anti-virus software and a good anti-spyware software.

'ctfmon.exe' is typically installed with MS Office package or something similar. It monitors active windows and provides text input service support for speech recognition, handwriting recognition, and other alternate user input forms. You can disable it via 'Control Panel' > 'Regional and Language Options'. 'jucheck.exe' is probably Sun's java update checker module.

If you've enabled 'system restore' in your system, you can try restoring the pc status to a point before this trouble began. Beware that any new program installed after this restore point was created may not run afterwards. If the restore process helps stabilize your pc and if you have an anti-virus s/w installed, run it to perform a full system scan.

Since you mentioned you're a novice, identifying each infection and removing it one by one could prove to be challenging. 'Kaspersky Internet Security 2010' is a good option for total system protection. You can easily download it from internet, install it, update it to latest definitions and run a full system scan. If everything works as expected, it'll find and fix the problems.

If nothing works and pc is in a mess, you may need to install Windows XP - not a reinstall, but a fresh install, preferably from a bootable backup cd which, we know for sure, is clean. Do not use any backup in your hard disk to install other programs since we may not know if they are also infected or not. Then make sure you install a good pc protection software. Run a full system scan and fix the errors, if any.