Okay, I'm borrowing a laptop to work on. I've already got the malware bytes exe loaded up on a flash drive. I printed out a copy of the "bleepingcomputer" page you sent me in case I lose wireless here (my pc is hardwired to my cable modem, but this laptop is connected to my family's wireless a few apartments over so the connection is kinda dodgy). I've had my computer turned off ever since this morning.
Now that I'm not in a rush to get out the door I can elaborate on what happened. It jumped on my pc and gave me fits last night, so my first reaction (with relatively little system security knowledge) was to run avast, CCleaner (I had something earlier in the year and a lot of tech sites were saying that program was supposed to fix that particular virus or trojan or whatever so I kept it installed in case I had the same trouble again), and threw up peerblock in case it helped (usually that thing is good about not letting sketchy adds connect, but I turned it off that evening because it seemed to be interfering the starcraft streams on teevox). I don't imagine it was a bright idea to leave the system running with that thing active, but I thought running avast and the ccleaner would take care of it, so it had an hour or two of uptime to mess around with stuff. I started going through task manager to close a couple processes I didn't recognize as a normal system process, but the virus didn't like that and activated an automatic reboot countdown so I quickly told avast to schedule a boot scan because I figured avast might be able to catch it if the virus isn't running and mucking about in windows yet. It popped up a couple suspicious files that had something to do with Java, and I chose "move all to chest" so I wouldn't have to babysit the thing (I thought moving to chest or vault or whatever is the safe thing to do, but maybe I was wrong). Unfortunately I waited about an hour for the bootscan to finish (it was actually moving at a pretty good pace, but my main was pretty full so it takes a while) and it wasn't even past saying 0% so I went to bed. When I got up in the morning the screen was displaying the windows user login page (I thought it would stay in the boot with the results of the scan, but it didn't) so I logged on to find out if avast had some good news for me. Windows said it had automatically restarted to apply an update, and had that little green shield sitting in the tray, so I have no idea if that's legit, or if the virus ran a fake update and infected even more of the system. I immediately started noticing the same shenanigans the virus was doing last night, so I turned the computer off (hard turnoff of at the power button) and started looking for alternatives. I came here this morning, and you know the rest.
Side question... My pc has a wireless card, but I never really got it to work properly so if some of the troubleshooting involves booting all the way back into windows should I be worried about the virus getting onto the network or other's in the vicinity? I figure if that would have happened it would've happened in the first few minutes of mucking about on my machine.
edit: I forgot to ask...
The virus was interfering with pretty much anything I tried to do. Should I go ahead and turn it back on to follow the guide, or wait for Essex(the local guru I gather?) just to be safe?
