Virus brought in with avast download

[andyjk]

Hi all, my first!

I am not a techie, by far, so I will keep it in lay terms and hope any answer will be returned in the same manner!!

I decided to find an anti virus free download for my Home PC. I did not have any noticeable probs with any viruses at this time. i searched a few sites and liked the look of the Avast product , so I downloaded yesterday, I saved it and then installed and run it. from this point I cannot get the machine to run unless I go to a past history point prior to the download.
(at this time I am on my PC at work)
A window appears stating that there is a virus in the boot up area, I'm afraid I did not note the wording with the actual address. Avast gives several solutions, deleting, isolating etc: but nothing happens when these suggestions are activated, except that the system locks up and I have to physically switch of and re boot. Avast/xp gives an alternative to go back in time.

Any ideas please.

I have XP Pro,  AMD 2800 processor, 1024 Ram, 200gb HD

Andy

[polonus]

Hello to you andyjk,

It is what the machine says, and probably you had it before, and it came up with  AVAST running a boot up memory scan on this probably  ïinfected comp.  For the discussion on MBR virus  from A to Z go to this topic: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=13771.0
Elaine to whom I replied did not comment on the answer  to her, but there you can find some answers. there is also MBR boot software on the net. If you feel ill at ease clearing a MBR infection, ask for advice here on the forum, e.g. DavidR is also good at these things.

Have a nice and MBR vrusfree day,

polonus

[DavidR]

I strongly doubt that avast brought a virus with it if you downloaded it from the avast site, rather there was a virus on your computer that was detected on the first boot scan.

Do you (or did) have any other AV installed?
If so what is/was it?

How did you remove it? - it is not advisable to have two resident AV scanners as they may conflict.

Get the system running and try one of the on-line scanners to give your system the once over.

On-line Virus Scanners and other useful Links Security-Ops.eu.tt