Ballsed XP

[Pannonian]

I've done a full run of AVG free, which came up clean, Adaware, which came up with half a dozen adware or cookies, and Spybot, which came up with a couple of dozen, mainly adware and cookies, but also a trojan. I'll run Spybot again on restart until it comes up clean.

The strange thing about this episode is that, other than a subfolder in MyDocuments, AFAICS the only areas affected have been MS applications. The System Tools have been deleted, My Office install is wrecked, and my VB install is wrecked, which means a helluva job digging out those CDs again.

[Pannonian]

I've done two runs each of AVG free and Spybot, and the second run of each has been clean. What next?

[Ramses II CP]

Interesting that Spybot caught a trojan and AVG didn't, but the next step is to test for system stability. Did removing the trojan restore your access to your files by any chance? Have you lost critical files that you want to recover before we proceed with a Windows repair?

When was your last backup?

Anyway, assuming you're still missing a chunk of files I'd install an undelete application and try to recover any mission critical files. Not Windows files, you can't usually undelete them functionally, files that are personally important. Recover what you can and then back up all of the data you want to keep. Since we don't know how broken Windows might be I wouldn't make any assumptions about being able to preserve the data on the drive during the recovery process.

Here's an undelete application I've used:

http://undelete-plus.com/

[Pannonian]

I used GetDataBack to recover some of the data files I lost. Windows seems ok now, but Office and VB need repairing and/or reinstalling. The other applications seem ok - most of the losses seem to have been from the Startmenu, so I've repaired their loss by pointing the shortcuts back at the actual apps. It still feels a bit strange that Office and VB were the apps to feel the main brunt of this.

I've tried googling for Acrobat, virus, and windows installer, but I've not found anything that matches what happened.