Hi essexboy -- I'm back for a while. Being a 76 year old geezer, taking care of someone else's kids is a real chore. But, they're good youngsters and he's a good freind and quite ill.
Well, good (more or less) news first. Without any corrective success on my part, my system MAY now be nearly normal. My attempt at SFC failed almost immediately do to corrupted or missing files/folders. (paraphrase somewhat.) Maybe, though it did do something because, after several reboots over a lengthy period of time and me usually trying a Windows update, suddenly it WORKED!!! Also, the Avast service which, with your initial help, showed up in TaskManager, but "stopped", is now shown as "running". Virus scan detecting nothing now.
The attempt to restore to a supposedly clean state failed (maybe because I'd had different drives at the time the RP had been taken?)
I've been trying to establish a definitive timeline for you to see which file got caught first along with subsequent detections. The time-stamps, though, don't make sense.
What, exactly, does the "last changed" date in the Virus Chest screen mean? On this (my main) machine where the problem started, the Chest currently showes a few files stamped around 3AM on the 18th of Jan. On the backup machine I'd first used to try correction, the Chest shows several files stamped aroud 3AM on the 17th. Those had been in the Docs&settings AND in a folder I'd created to save the D&S before I mucked around with it. But that "save" folder hadn't even been created until about 5:30 on the 17th. That's 2 hours AFTER the time the Chest date indicates they got detected in that folder??? On both machines, the Chest "time" extends over just a few minutes.
I would have thought a text log would have been created which would show the actual events. That would also be helpful to cut and paste info for you. Maybe that will be a future suggestion. Right now, these dates/times don't seem to make sense.
But, again, the machine seems mostly OK. Thanks very much for your help.
