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Cautious Optimism
May. 2nd, 2010 01:08 pmMy main computer is behaving normally again, and is no longer constantly stopping with "spyware" warnings from programs I know I never installed. (That was an immediate danger sign, which was why within a few minutes I had the machine completely off-net and was using a separate machine to search for answers.) It's lucky for me that I've used MSCONFIG before, although it had been a while, and was able to get it running on reboot before the bug got itself reloaded, which allowed me to intercept it.
( Fun (not) with manual registry editing )
Today, the machine is acting properly. There's no sign of the original problem. It was a half-decent try, though. It put an icon into my system tray that sort of looked like the Microsoft Security icon, and it had plausible-sounding warnings; however, it wasn't quite right, and besides, one of the error messages had grammar that suggested that whoever wrote it didn't actually know much English. (I wish I'd written it down, but at the time, I was in too much of a hurry to get the computer offline and shut down to take those kinds of notes.) And beyond that, most programs go away when you say No and Close and Exit, and none of the legitimate security software I have refuses to let you bring up the Task Manager (alt-shift-escape) to see what's running. Fortunately the program appears to have not been quite bullet-proof and I was able to power-down the computer without even having to do a "hard" power-off.
Fingers crossed that I stopped it in time. I've re-connected it to the internet and we'll see how it works. Thank goodness for all of my backups!
( Fun (not) with manual registry editing )
Today, the machine is acting properly. There's no sign of the original problem. It was a half-decent try, though. It put an icon into my system tray that sort of looked like the Microsoft Security icon, and it had plausible-sounding warnings; however, it wasn't quite right, and besides, one of the error messages had grammar that suggested that whoever wrote it didn't actually know much English. (I wish I'd written it down, but at the time, I was in too much of a hurry to get the computer offline and shut down to take those kinds of notes.) And beyond that, most programs go away when you say No and Close and Exit, and none of the legitimate security software I have refuses to let you bring up the Task Manager (alt-shift-escape) to see what's running. Fortunately the program appears to have not been quite bullet-proof and I was able to power-down the computer without even having to do a "hard" power-off.
Fingers crossed that I stopped it in time. I've re-connected it to the internet and we'll see how it works. Thank goodness for all of my backups!
