Yep....shops like that are what keeps my "side job" so busy. 99.999% of the time there is no reason to wipe out the drive and reinstall.heh, I worked at a computer repair shop up until a week ago. We'd get about 3 or 4 machines a day with different variation of windows antivirus 2009. It is a major pain to remove, and usually a system that has this malware installed has other malware as well, so we always just recommended a windows reload.
Yep....shops like that are what keeps my "side job" so busy. 99.999% of the time there is no reason to wipe out the drive and reinstall.
The XP Antivirus 2009 is a simply hoax. It's not malware, spyware or a virus. The problems start when it's run and people click try to have it fix the problems. To remove it, open task manager and stop the task. I believe it's antivirus2009.exe. Once the task is stopped, go into windows explorer and delete the folder.
I use 3 tools to fix infected pc's. Combofix, AVG Antivirus and Winternals System Commander. I have not had to format and reinstall an operating system on any pc because of an infection (and if your in college, I've been doing this since you were in grade school ).
I wasn't prepared to do it because I had not backed up all my pics and things. The last time my nephews messed up my computer I lost over 30gigs of music.
Oh...btw...someone said something about ctrl+alt+delete and stop the application. Just so you know what ever version of the malware I had on my computer it disabled my control panel, task manager, and all other windows related utilities. I had to go in through the back door...explorer...to get to any usable program.