Greetings,
I will be very happy and grateful if anyone can help me get rid of this thing...
Info, as accurate as I can make it:
I recently (a few days ago) reformatted my hard drive (let's call it D since I have another partition called C which I did not make any changes to.) So this means I reinstalled WinXP Pro on it; the reason why I reformatted was because I was having severe issues with booting my PC.
The next day I installed avast Home Edition, 3 hours later it tells me I have a trojan horse associated with the lsass.exe file.
The day after, it tells me of another Trojan.
Today, yet another.
Now I do not remember the names it gave me and they do not seem to be in the avast log even though I didn't erase it. All times it recommended me to 'move to chest' and so that's what I did in all cases.
Yesterday while I was browsing the net with my beloved MSIE v.6 I started getting random browser windows opening to various sites: some porn, some dating sites, etc. So I did some research and found out some stuff about BHOs which I did find running as processes, so I disabled them in IE. Upgrading to IE7 did not solve the problems. So I installed Firefox. The windows do not pop up in Firefox browsing windows. But, they still popped up in IE windows even when I did not have any IE windows running. I haven't yet discerned a pattern to when they do appear.
This still happened today. However, the big problem of today is that all of a sudden I started getting stuff that you see in the screenshot. Obviously, these messages are fake and not alerts from my OS but are caused by the virus/trojan/worm/whatever that I have. The messages that they bring up are persistent and varied and involve notifying me of infection and the need to download software to fix it (software which undoubtedly leads to more infection. No I have not downloaded any of it.) Also, I see I have two new icons on my desktop as you see.
So I ran avast virus cleaner and made sure I closed programs, disabled on-access protection. It found nothing.
Er.......also the problem I had prior to reformatting about not being able to boot up Windows with any amount of ease persists though it is definitely better than before. However, I do not know if this is related to this virus/trojan/worm/whatever or just some hardware issue.
Help, please. I have tried to be as detailed as I can. Yes it is messing up some of my programs.