Houston, We Have a Problem (was forum=28)Follow

Hello everyone. I'm pretty computer stupid, and I think I might have something wrong. I was playing FFXI today, and I got a red-dot of disconnect. I was irritated at first, but I figured I would just log back in and continue on my way. Well then the problems started. I couldn't get connected to the internet at all. The wireless I connect to still had a strong signal, so I should have been able to connect just fine. Like I said, I'm computer dumb, so I did the only thing I knew to do - I rebooted! When I did, I opened firefox to see if I could connect, and it told me thank you for installing the google search bar. I hadn't installed anything, I hadn't downloaded anything, I was just playing my game and got disconnected. I didn't think much of it until my computer froze, so i had to hard reset it. After logging back on, the problem got worse. Now I couldn't connect on Firefox at all. If I logged in with internet explorer, I could browse pages, but it was just really really slow. Then if I would open Firefox at all, I could no longer do anything on the internet. That scared me because I thought I might have a virus or something, so I ran my spybot - Search and Destroy, and a few things came up, I removed them. The issue continued, so I uninstalled firefox.

After that, I was able to use internet explorer a little bit, but it still wasn't very fast. Since I was able to connect though, I ran an update for search and destroy, and now i'm getting a lot more things to remove. I also redownloaded and reinstalled Firefox, but so far I'm still not able to connect to any pages using it.

Can anyone suggest anything? Also if I shouldn't be using Search & Destroy, what should I use. Please bear in mind I am internet stupid, so if you have a direct link, I'd be very appreciative. I have the next 2 days off, and I can't spend them sitting at home unable to play, or I might go crazy!

Thanks in advance, and sorry for wall-o-text,
Serena

Sounds like you got a chunk of adware and spyware on your machine or some registry errors. Could have a virus or two as well. Like Paskil said, get Ad-Aware and run it. I suggest exercising caution when running old programs as if you run them and a virus is lurking in them, once you pull the program into your RAM the virus will infect your machine. Do not, and I repeat, do not go to any webpages or execute any programs that require a user name and password log in. Yes, if you have a keylogger in the form of a trojan or spyware it can grab your password easily, but most run of the mill script kiddies aren't smart enough to use an advanced keylogger like that.

Run your AV scanner and if you are using a good AV program, such as AVG, it should find the viruses. Keep running Spybot Search & Destroy until it comes back clean. I also suggest getting Ace Utilities as it can clean your registry and remove junk files. You'd be surprised at how many pieces of spyware hide in your temp files. Once you get the programs downloaded, kill your internet. That's right, you aren't seeing things, kill your internet. If you are on a laptop with an internal wireless drive, turn off the hardware switch. If you have a USB device that allows you to connect to the wireless, take it out.

If none of the above works, reformat your HD and install everything from scratch. You should only do that if your machine is beyond repair. Never download things from shady sites and always run NoScript and have up to date Anti-Virus software.

EDIT: Just saw that you said you rebooted your machine. You are an idiot for doing that. Never, ever, reboot your machine if you think it may be infected. That's the easiest way to allow malware to spread. You might be able to still fix it, but it's going to take a lot more effort than if you hadn't rebooted.

Edited, Feb 23rd 2009 1:56pm by PaladinStargazer

No fair, I was gonna suggest one.

Sorry. We did it. McAfee has new DAT files now though... ;)

Only semi-kidding here. I don't suppose you've downloaded or connected to a windows box located in say East Asia lately?

Can anyone suggest anything?

Just load your backup image.

Hahahahaha. No, seriously, though, you likely have a recovery partition if you bought an overpriced big box store computer in the last 5 years...and I'm going to go way out on a limb here and assume that you didn't build a machine and deploy a customized OS with drivers slipstreamed into the install.

Save any data you need to a USB drive or whatever, and restore from the recovery partition.

Good luck.