Chameleon Killing Does Not Complete

[tom94022]

How long should Chameleon take to complete.  Chameleon#1 has been running in the 'Killing" mode for for more than 16 hours on another machine - at what point do I kill it and if so, what is the best way?  (I can use Task Manager to kill applications or processes or both)

 

FWIW, on a highly infected friends machine I first launched Chameleon#1 in Windows7 Home Premium Safe Mode which according to Task Manager had 31 running processes.  After several hours in the "Killing" mode it completed and launched Malwarebytes which found and presumably removed about 90 infections.  I then rebooted and in normal mode relaunched Chameleon#1 at about 4:00 pm yesterday.  It is 10:00 am today and still running :-(

 

FWIW, in both cases the driver loaded, was enabled and the update was successful.

 

I suspect I am not the only person to have this sort of problem so I suggest u include runtime estimations and kill instructions on your Chameleon page.

 

Thanks for your help

 

Tom

[exile360]

Greetings

Currently Chameleon cannot be terminated via Task Manager. This is by design to prevent malware from doing so as well. I will definitely bring this scenario up with the developers to see if we can come up with a reasonable solution for a future release.

In the meantime, are you able to get Malwarebytes Anti-Malware to run without the use of Chameleon? If so, you might try doing that instead just so you can get the machine disinfected.

If that does not work for you, then please follow the instructions posted here and one of our malware removal specialists will assist you in getting your system cleaned up.

[tom94022]

Thanks for the impressive and fast response, I am now a paid user with a CD on its way  

 

I did a hard reboot and then launched Malwarebytes directly.  It launched but when I then attempted a "Full Scan" the scan window appeared but was blank and after 5 minutes or so I tried to stop it (X button on Window) which changed the window message to (not responding)

 

I did a second hard reboot which failed and Windows Recovery took over.   It is now attempting to repair "disk errors" and has been running for about 3 hours.  I guess it is a version of SCANDISK which can take a lot of time on a 500 GB drive.  At some point I will hard reboot this and see if I can do a low level system restore.

 

Any suggestions?  I will keep u posted

[tom94022]

It finished the Windows Recovery after another 1½ hours.  I'm now going to try and run Malwarebytes again.

Will advise u of results, no action requested right now

[tom94022]

This time Malwarebytes came up and ran fine, finding 30 problems in scanning 300k+ objects.  I allowed it to fix the problems and then rebooted as suggested.  System seems fine now.

 

I reran Malwarebytes and the downloaded database was reported as being 122 days out of date!  So I let it update which turned out to be from v2013.08.05.01 to.v2013.08.05.02.  Then I ran a Fast Scan which in 5 minutes reported no problems.

 

At this point I am satisfied.  My only suggestion is that you give some estimates of run time for the various scans and Chameleons

 

Thanks

 

Tom

[exile360]

OK, so you got it working now, that's good. I'm betting the entire reason you were seeing the hangups with Chameleon and the scanner itself were due to some level of disk corruption, which Windows itself corrected once it took over with its startup repair routine.

If you see any further signs of infection or have any other problems, then please do follow the instructions in the link I provided above and we'll make sure that everything is OK with that system for you.