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Hi again @kevinf80, thanks again! I've passed this on to him, and I think we're all set. How do I close this out for you?

Hi again @kevinf80, I'll mention to my husband that we need to uninstall FRST. Does having it still installed prevent Malwarebytes from doing the regular scan? Or is it just that we need to uninstall it in case we ever need to use it again, and one does that from a fresh install? I'd just like to let him know your final thoughts and make sure he has no more questions, then we can close out. Thanks!

Hi again @kevinf80, thank you for the browser tool links. We'll check them out! Right now we've reverted to Chrome. Brave was serving a purpose for a while related to not bogging down a work-from-home VPN, but right now Brave is more of an issue than Chrome--wasn't so before . . . so odd. We appreciate your help very much!

Hi again @kevinf80, got it done another way, so check your account 🙂

Hi again @kevinf80, PayPal had trouble processing our donation. Will try again later tonight.

Hi @kevinf80, Sorry, super-long, hectic day here! So we got the Windows version update done. And since then, Chrome has been happy once again--nice and snappy. But Brave, the first time I opened it, promptly crashed. Blue screen, had to do a hard restart. I've only used Brave once more since then, and only briefly, so am not really sure if it's okay, or not. It was using the whole CPU and a ton of memory when it went down. Didn't have THAT many tabs open--have had that many open many times before. So that part is still a mystery. We are so thankful for your help in getting us to this point. Knowing it wasn't a virus was a huge relief, and knowing it would be worth it to do the Windows version update was a help as well. We're posting a thank-you to your PayPal account, next 🙂.

Hello again, @kevinf80, just wanted to let you know that we're nearly done (we think / hope) with updating to the latest version of Windows 10. It's been slow but nearly there. We see you are in the U.K. so you are hopefully getting some sleep, and we'll be away from this project till Monday ourselves. We'll be back in touch Monday, hopefully with good news! Thank you so much for your help.

Hello again @kevinf80, Windows says we are up to date on updates. The most recent update was four days ago. It's this one: December 8, 2020—KB4592449 (OS Builds 18362.1256 and 18363.1256) Here's the link to the MS page on that: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4592449/windows-10-update-kb4592449 In the several other update categories, no updates are recent. Hmmmm, as I read the details on the Dec. 8 update, it says that as of Dec. 8 our version of Windows 10, 1903, has reached end of servicing and needs to be updated to 1909. Well. That sounds as if it might matter, in which case, I wonder why Windows doesn't tell one to do it? Should we do it? I'm unsure whether this relates to the problem we are working on here. Thanks!

Hi @kevinf80, this went faster than I expected so I wasn't sure if it was really done, but here's the readout: Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.18363.1256] (c) 2019 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. C:\Windows\system32>sfc/scannow Beginning system scan. This process will take some time. Beginning verification phase of system scan. Verification 100% complete. Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations. C:\Windows\system32> Next I'll follow your instructions about the Windows updates.

Hi @kevinf80, Here are the results: Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.18363.1256] (c) 2019 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. C:\Windows\system32>DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool Version: 10.0.18362.1139 Image Version: 10.0.18363.1256 [==========================100.0%==========================] No component store corruption detected. The operation completed successfully. C:\Windows\system32> We haven't installed anything recently, and we haven't launched any updates, but we have some applications that should be updating themselves automatically--Webroot, Malwarebytes, maybe some others--plus the browsers and the operating system. Brave did seem to make one change not too long ago that I noticed at the feature level--the option to tip appeared in Twitter--so it must have updated itself. I'd say that was within the last 48 hours, so it might be in the right timeframe to be part of the problem. If you need to know latest updates for any of the auto-updates, we'd be happy to get that for you if you happen to know how we would do that. Thanks!

Here they are, @kevinf80! FRST and Addition files. Thanks so much for your time and your help. Addition.txt FRST.txt

Thank you so much for your help, @kevinf80! We will take these steps very soon and post the logs. Such a relief to have help with this. Thank you for your time.

Hi! Grateful for any help. Yesterday browsers slowed down immensely. Brave crashed repeatedly--at first we figured it was a Brave issue. But Chrome also became slow. Memory usage running very high during all this. CPU sometimes high as well. Windows 10 machine, under one year old. Today I went to run a scan--took a while to open Malwarebytes, and once open, it told me it was in the process of scanning and had been scanning for over thirty hours--and had gotten through not much more than 100K files in that time. Does this confirm infection and if so, what are our best steps to take next? Thank you very much!