afterhours

Um -- I really appreciate the hard work you put into making these forums useful, but I don't think you read my post carefully. I was able to restore the systems infected to complete health, and Malwarebytes back to full function, but it took some work on identifying the infectious agent, crippling it, and THEN I could properly install/update/run MWB and other tools. That was kind of my point, along with posting the exact error here so that someone might find the solution if they google the term. Other threads on this forum where the topic was broached have been closed, unfortunately, but with the typical threats such as touchpoint and SoftCop, it can be handy to see how they directly go for Malwarebytes and how to get around them.

So there are some closed threads on the error coughed up when one attempts to launch an existing install, or a new install, of malwarebytes. MBAM_ERROR_EXPANDING_VARIABLES (0,9) is one of the common errors. I've seen this in the last three days when a system is infected with the ThinkPoint bogus security trojan. Nasty little bugger. A bit of Googling and one can figure out how to kill off the nasty bits such as hotfix.exe and the .bat files it creates. Killing the process with the task manager and such. Just an FYI to anyone else still messing with this little beastie. Once killed off of a system, a clean reinstall (or just launch/update) of Malwarebytes will work. Other bits that are proving helpful in cleaning up after this thing are Spybot. Haven't seen AVG catch it yet. Perhaps other free solutions like AVAST would work better -- not tested. Seems to propagate from facebook links for now -- can careless click-happy users.