"XP Home Security" - cleanup afterwards

[imdave]

Over the past few days I had been trying to fix my Dads PC. The desktop items and toolbar kept dissapearing, I had a fix but it was just temporary. I think I found the route cause and spent the best part of yesterday cleaning up the "XP Home Security" from the XP Media Centre 2005 PC, using this thread so want to thank the mod LDTate for his guide there for using ATF Cleaner and ComboFix. Apart from a random BSOD at/after stage 50 of ComboFix, I think it went well. At least it was working when I left it, with no sign of the virus.

I'll have access to the PC again tomorrow, and hopefully I'll remember to come back and edit this post with a MalwareBytes log file.

I know that at least one user account had their folders hidden, so do you suggest I run the unhide.exe from the windows folder, correct? Will that unhide all the folders in all the user accounts, Desktop, Video folders etc?

The virus, or whatever it is/was, messed with the internet access of the PC. I could get online with my laptop connecting to the wireless router, but the wired connection to the PC wasnt working. I managed to use a Wireless USB adapter to get the PC online before I even found the infected user account. Would ATF Cleaner and ComboFix have fixed the wired connection, or is that the next thing that should be on my list.

If it was my w7 machine I'd just cut my losses, backup my files then reinstall the OS. But as its XP Media Centre 2005 (he's had just over 4 years now) that makes reinstalling difficult as he is happy with XP, doesn't want to change to w7. Plus he uses the Media Centre tuner with his VirginMedia cable tv box, and obviously standard XP lacks media centre.

It may all be for nothing though, as he's been frustrated with performance that has been steadily decreasing, boot times (to a usable state) getting ridiculous.

[screen317]

Hi and welcome to Malwarebytes.

Cleaning your Temp files may have limited what we can recover.

Do you still need help?