Malwarebytes quick scan 19+ hours

[lgentryco]

Please forgive me for being a complete newbie to Malwarebytes and malware problems in general. I will likely leave out information that you might need to help me with my current problem. If that is the case, please direct me to submit whatever additional information would be useful. I'm at the end of my rope here and could really use some help.

I contracted what seems to be known as the "fake netsky" trojan. I followed a guide that included Malwarebytes and LSPfix. Malwarebytes would not run so I played around with deleting files known to be part of the problem and modifying registry settings until my machine was somewhat usable. I then managed to get Malwarebytes to execute by downloading the randomly named executable and placing it in my Malwarebytes folder.

Malwarebytes quick scan has been executing for over 19 hours. It has scanned over 2333,000 objects and identified 41 infected objects. Well over half of the execution time has been spent "Performing extra and heuristics scan."

My main concern is cleaning my system. I would wipe the machine and start fresh, but it is a work issued laptop that I would have to take or ship to corporate field support to take care of that. If this will complete this weekend sometime and hopefully do me some good, I will let it go.

My questions are:

(1) Is this typical? It doesn't seem to be, but everything is incredibly slow on the machine. I'm assuming that has to do with the infection.

(2) Does Malwarebytes get caught in loops or other scan problems that can make it run infinitely and I might be waiting for it to end and it will not?

(3) If I "Abort Scan", will it give me the option to clean what it has found? Or will I lose that ability if I abort?

At this point I'm really interested in Question 3. I would like to abort, clean the objects that it has found, and then perhaps get things up and running and try another scan that would hopefully go quicker.

Any help or guidance at all would be *greatly* appreciated.

Regards,

Luke

[GT500]

1) Our Quick Scan normally completes in 6 minutes, and on my computer in less than 2 minutes.

2) No. There are only problems like that when something else is interfering with it.

3) You will be allowed to view what was found, and remove it.

I also recommend following these instructions (skipping any steps you are unable to complete) for posting in our Malware Removal - HijackThis Logs forum. If you cannot follow any of those steps, then please create a new topic in that forum explaining what happened when you tried to run each of the tools in the instructions, and the expert who helps you will be able to suggest steps to take to get the tools working.

Alternately, you may contact our helpdesk and someone can work through this issue with you via e-mail.

[mountaintree16]

One other thing to try, is ATF Cleaner, a temp file cleaner. A temp file cleaner will help speed up scan times, although I think that your long scan time doesn't have anything to do with temp files, but cleaning out your temp files can't hurt

To delete your temp files, please download ATF Cleaner by Atribune.

If using Vista or 7, please right click and choose "Run as Administrator".

Click the select all box. If you have items you wish to keep in your Recycle Bin, please uncheck that box. Then, click "Empty Selected".

If you use Firefox or Opera, please click on those names at the top of ATF Cleaner and click the select all button again. If you have saved passwords that you'd like to keep, click NO at the prompt. Again, click "Empty selected".

I recommend running ATF Cleaner at least once a week

And definitely follow the directions of GT500 above me!

Also, as a side note, when replying, please use the "Add reply" button or erase what the person you are replying to said, as this makes the forum easier to read.

Thank you