Got a real good 'un here.

My mate and fellow forummers PC went down, so I went to fix yesterday. It was completely zombied, it wont go into task manager, it had an Apache web server running and at least 3 different strains of virii, it had compromised the firewall and Avast antivirus. Re-installed Avast and ran a boot time scan and got over 7 thousand deletions. Then Avast got compromised again so I got rid and installed AVG, ran a scan and got another 8 thousand (8395 to be exact) reports.

Put on comodo, re-connected the cable modem and got back on the net and sorted the browser hijackers out. Then downloaded Process explorer from sysinternals to temporarily replace taskmgr.

Left the machine working, but most of the installed software appears to have been compromised, office, foxit, nero wont run, looks like I will have to do a clean install at some point.

But i still cant get taskmgr to run, press ctrl-alt-del and I get the same stupid message everytime! Help! (His login is set to admin as well)

Steve

IIRC the virus strains I can remember were luder-f and worm-stration I think

I had this problem on my old PC, it was some sort of spyware that blocked mine. I was gonna flatten my HDD anyway, i just did it sooner than I planned.

A few ways to try and get it back

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/Taskmanager_error.htm

As the machine has been compromised though it should be formatted and the OS reinstalled. You've got no way of telling what else has been changed/compromised etc. and the only way to be sure it's back to a good state (well as good as Windows gets) is to reinstall. There could be a rootkit or anything on it.

A few ways to try and get it back

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/Taskmanager_error.htm

As the machine has been compromised though it should be formatted and the OS reinstalled. You've got no way of telling what else has been changed/compromised etc. and the only way to be sure it's back to a good state (well as good as Windows gets) is to reinstall. There could be a rootkit or anything on it.

Yeh, I know i will have to re-install everything, sat downloading everything I need at the moment, time is the problem, I am away this weekend and really busy all week, so I am just trying to get him a bare system so he can check his email, surf the web (and hopefully NOT reinfect the bloody machine again), he is an American football Ref (Hup, Hup,Hup Yawn!) so needs his email. A full install and re-build of his system will take hours.:mad:

But thanks for the link - my googling skills are rubbish today!

Just in case it is a spyware problem, have you run an antispyware scan?

Otherwise, fnkysknky's link seems to be the way to go.

Yeh, I know i will have to re-install everything, sat downloading everything I need at the moment, time is the problem, I am away this weekend and really busy all week, so I am just trying to get him a bare system so he can check his email, surf the web (and hopefully NOT reinfect the bloody machine again), he is an American football Ref (Hup, Hup,Hup Yawn!) so needs his email. A full install and re-build of his system will take hours.:mad:

But thanks for the link - my googling skills are rubbish today!

Crap I know but it needs doing :)

You should be able to get a functioning basic system back up and running in a couple of hours.

If I were you I'd stick the tools you need to fix it (Spyware/Ad-ware removal, virus scanner, stinger etc etc) on the C: drive of the machine and boot it up in safe mode to run them all.

If it's a home user, it's definately a spyware/virus issue. If you or him like a challenge then troubleshoot it, if not then rebuild it.