nothing detected but lots of probs

[stefanz]

well in terms of what I'm running consistently; it's just avast and Zone alarm - the others I've just run to try and get rid of existing malware that avast couldn't remove / detect.

I've defragged recently, so that shouldn't be an issue.

I'm wondering if reinstalling windows is the way to go, although that will involve quite a lot of time to get everything back to how it is now (i.e. Service Pack 2, office) etc etc.

Frank - I've got rid of Freeram XP Pro. I've run Ashampoo Winoptimiser in order to check that there's nothing amiss in the registry, but I'll check out Tuneup utilities.

BTW, am I correct in thinking that I should only run either Avast *or* Ewido at one time?

[FreewheelinFrank]

They work well together. Even the full, trial version of Ewido was OK with avast! and the free scanner doesn't seem to have any problem working while avast! is running. You may get some malware identified by both programs during a scan by Ewido. (Or any other anti-malware program, like Ad-Aware etc.) Temporarily disabling avast!'s on-access scanner is a good idea while running other scanners, just to avoid any possible conflict.

[stefanz]

I just installed and ran a variety of fixes from the tune up utilities suite - in particular the registry fixer found a lot of issues, and I've (automatically) fixed them.

So far (touch wood) my computer's running a lot better - and I haven't had any random shut downs yet. So it looks like things are fine now - i.e. Malware free according to Avast's boottime scan, spybot, and others, and my registry should be cleaned up. Slightly strange that Tune Up fixed things whereas another program (Ashampoo Winoptimiser) didn't.


Many thanks to all who have helped, and in particular FreewheelinFrank

[FreewheelinFrank]

No problem!

TuneUp impresses me a lot, too. I always run it on any computer I clean up and it always finds loads of issues.