Hi,
Sorry it has taken me so long to get back to this forum, but I did not want to just take up any more time from the kind people that had taken the time to look at my problem and respond.
It turns out that I did have some kind of virus (I don't know what kind it was or how it got into my PC.). It also turns out that NONE of the antivirus scanners that I tried were able to detect this little monster (Avast!, AVG free edition, Symantic, McAfee, Panda Etc. Etc.).
The symptoms of the little creature are:
1.- It will disable any antivirus software and prevent it from doing a complete scan for virus.
2.- If there are any resident protection modules it will disable them.
3.- It sets itself as a memory resident task (Avast memory scan did not detect it!)
4.- It copies itself into the C: drive root directory and into WINNT\system32 directory.
5.- AND ITS NAME IS:
msiexec.exe.
HOW DID I FIND THE BUGGER?
I did an ALT+CNTL+DELETE and looked at the tasks currently running. I wrote the names of each of the tasks and then clicked cancel.
Next I right clicked on the computer icon and clicked on the manage entry of the displayed menu options. This took me to a selection of choices one of which is system information. I clicked the little plus sign to expand this menu and then clicked the little plus sign on the software environment option. There I click on the running tasks. After the system refreshed I was able to see the same running tasks that I had seen when I did the ALT+CNTL+DELETE except that now I could see the path , version, size of file, and most importantly the file date.
I knew that I had been infected some time around the 5th of September 2004. Well, the only running task that had a file date of September 5th was a little fellow named "msiexec.exe". It had a path of WINNT/system32.
I went to the WINNT\system32 path and found the little bugger. I renamed it and changed its extension (Yes windows complained a lot about this but I knew that it was the only way to kill the fellow).
Then I did an ALT+CNTL+DELETE and under running tasks I stopped the fellow.
I then rebooted my PC and Lo and Behold, Avast resident protection was on and active, and I could do complete virus scans again.
I now did the ultimate, I went to WINNT\system32 and deleted the file I had previously renamed. Then I did a C: drive search for all the possible entries with the original name "msiexec.exe". The search found another copy of the bugger on the C: drive root directory. I deleted this copy also.
I did another reboot and all was still fine. All the time that I was doing this I was not connected to the DSL network.
I think that I am free of the virus or whatever this thing was.
I wrote this detailed explanation in the hope that maybe it will help someone with the same problem and even perhaps some antivirus vendor will look into this and investigate why it was that this thing was not detected by their respective softwares.
Thank you all for your time and help.
Aloha, Amaru
