My Printer has gone nuts!

[Brittany]

I was currently using an HP printer, and have now switched to a 'brother HL-5140.'

i'm not sure what was going on, but when i restarted my computer earlier this morning, my HP printer went nuts. It started printing complete garbage.. consistantly.  I finally uninstalled it after turning it off and on a few times, unplugging it, and tring to reinstall the drivers.

I scanned with avast a few times, everytime comming up clean.

I read about a virus called Bugbear.. but i cant find anything else with similar symptoms..

anyone have a clue?

thanks
Brittany

[szc]

What a lovely new member ! Oh my God... 

Welcome to forums Britanny !

Here you can find one of those utilities for celaning that nasty Win32.Bugbear:

http://www3.ca.com/securityadvisor/newsinfo/collateral.aspx?cid=59266

Here are some facts about that worm:

W32.Bugbear@mm is a mass-mailing worm. It can also spread through network shares. It has keystroke-logging and backdoor capabilities. The worm also attempts to terminate the processes of various antivirus and firewall programs.

Because the worm does not properly handle the network resource types, it may flood shared printer resources, which causes them to print garbage or disrupt their normal functionality.

It is written in the Microsoft Visual C++ 6 programming language and is compressed with UPX v0.76.1-1.22

Also, I would recommend visiting a TrendMicro's Housecall (online scanner). Click here please:

http://housecall.antivirus.com/housecall/start_frame.asp

Enter your country of residence, click OK, and then when all little thingies are downloaded, up and running, chose your partitions that you want to scan, and click SCAN NOW. Easy as that... 

Cheers !

P.S. That little "yep" below your avatar is actually an answer for all those who will ask you: "... Britanny, that lovely photo... is that really you ? "... and then, the answer is right under their nose, haha... 

[Lisandro]

Also, keep Windows, avast! and your firewall updated. Safe surfing! 

[DavidR]

Hi Britanny, welcome to the forums.

I was currently using an HP printer, and have now switched to a 'brother HL-5140.'

If you still have the two printers installed, perhaps the HP one got corrupted in some way. Try the uninstall/delete the HP printer driver and reboot and allow windows to detect new hardware again and install the HP driver again and see if this has any difference to what you tried.

Re the possible bugbear thing if that is what is causing the garbage (although avast should have detected bugbear), once resolved I would suggest you switch off file and printer sharing unless you absolutely have to have it enabled.