Scans taking forever, or too fast with error 8

[ackthbbft]

I seem to have messed up my own computer while trying to help a friend fix hers. Let me first put things in context (with the understanding that I may have to eventually go to the Malware Removal Support forum).

 

My friend of mine had someone "clean" her computer with Malwarebytes (a very old version based on the screenshots she sent me from her phone camera), and ever since she can no longer get on the Internet due to some proxy settings that simply won't go away (pointing to 127.0.0.1). Her MBAM scan showed her to be infected with OptimizerPro. She ran MBAM again, and it seemed to get rid of it, but the proxy settings are still a problem.

 

So, I do some further research, and came across AdwCleaner and HitmanPro (and it's Kickstart bootable offline tool). I'm in IT, and these tools seem legit, and my associate said he's also familiar with HitmanPro. So, since she can't get on the internet to download either, I go ahead and put HitmanPro.Kickstart on a USB for her (I was originally going to put MS Windows Defender Offline on it, since it has actually helped me in the past, unlike their active online System Center Enpoint Protection). So, I figured I'd go ahead and test it out on my own laptop, figuring it will just do its thing, not find any infections, and I can trust it will run on her laptop as well.

 

So HitmanPro.Kickstart boots up my PC, and it runs System Repair (which was a surprise; I figured it would go straight into HitmanPro). Of course, System Repair says it will automatically fix anything it finds, and in the end seemed to only find one item with errors. Once that was done, I hit Cancel instead of Finish (since I figured it would make no difference since it says it would have fixed anything automatically already), but instead of continuing to load HitmanPro, my system rebooted.

 

I removed the USB drive, and booted into Windows 7 normally. All of a sudden, Chrome is locking up, and I see messages saying "Waiting for www.securedvisit.com..." down where one would see the target of a hyperlink appear. After a few moments, I get a notification that my caching SSD is running out of space. I eventually have to hard boot it, as it would not shut down on its own. After rebooting, I start getting the same slowdown, and find tens of thousands of instances of "javaws.exe" running in TaskMgr. Taskkill can't even keep up with each new instance loading to get rid of them. I reboot again, and immediately uninstall all versions of Java from my laptop via Control Panel (had to do this in regular Windows, as it would not let me uninstall them in Safe Mode). I perform a Disk Cleanup, and then also search for *.jnlp files that might have been triggering the javaws.exe instances, and came back with nothing (but they may have been already wiped by Disk Cleanup's temp file and downloaded program file options).

 

So now my laptop is no longer slowing down from java (which I hope I'll be able to live without; there is a chatroom I use for a radio show that requires java, but I'll just deal with it until they get with the 21st century and switch to another platform).

 

Now I run my own Malwarebytes scan, and it absolutely CRAWWWLLLLED through the System File scan — 10 hours and counting at this point. In fact, it never even finished before I had to kill it due to another Chrome lockup that seemed to affect everything else.

 

I uninstalled it, and ran the MBAM-Clean tool, then reinstalled.

 

Then I go into Safe Mode and run it from there. BAM! 7 and a half minutes later, it is done — even the File System scan — but actually seemed to crash midway through the Heuristics Scan with "Scanner failed with error code 8," despite saying the scan completed successfully with no detected objects. I run it again, same result.

 

So I decide, just to be safe, in case there is an infection that might be causing it to result in this "failed success," I decide to run it in Chameleon #1 mode. We are back again to it CRAWWWLLLLING through the File System scan. ACK!! I'm about ready to cancel this scan and start another Chameleon mode to see if it runs faster. I simply don't have the time to let it run at the current speed, since I commute with my laptop and there's no way it will be near to finishing by the time I have to leave the office again.

 

I haven't installed or run them yet, but I have also downloaded ComboFix, AdwCleaner, and FARBAR. I could also try the regular non-kickstart HitmanPro.

 

If anyone can explain why MBAM is running so slowly, and why alternately it runs so fast but gives the error 8, I'd appreciate it.

[ackthbbft]

So I decide, just to be safe, in case there is an infection that might be causing it to result in this "failed success," I decide to run it in Chameleon #1 mode. We are back again to it CRAWWWLLLLING through the File System scan.

 

Seriously, in the past 90 minutes, it has only scanned 420 files.

[ackthbbft]

One other thing I've noticed, when clicking Cancel to stop the current scan, the button just turns from blue to gray, but nothing seems to stop. Time elapsed just keeps running.

[ackthbbft]

Yet another update, after closing the MBAM window, I found the mbam-chameleon.exe "DOS" window with amessage saying the scan timed out after 1807 seconds (30 minutes, basically, even though the scanner was approaching 2 hours when I killed it). I can't seem to get out of this chameleon-created safemode sandbox, either.

[ackthbbft]

Suddenly found that the shortcuts no longer work! Uninstalled, ran clean remove tool, reinstalled. Back to scanning outside Chameleon mode, and it's back to being slow. I really don't get it.

[Firefox]

More than likely you will end up in the Malware removal area, but lets get a quick look at some scans...

We would need more info on the system....

Please read the following and in your next reply ATTACH the 3 requested logs - Diagnostic Logs

(the three files should be CheckResults.txt, FRST.txt and Addition.txt)

Thank You,

Firefox