Holy motherofpearl... I'm having such a problem.  I've gotten to the point where I'm going to *have* to reformat my harddrive completely, because I no longer can get online.

 

I blame desktop.exe run out of a hidden folder (I forget which one) inside the WINDOWS/System32 folders.  The folder it's in begins with a lower case i, that much I remember.  But I'm not in front of my computer and I am unable to get to it right now. 

 

Unless someone can tell me a way of getting this stubborn, pain in my rear end program (and the virus-infected .dll file that I THINK is named sysupd.dll in that same folder, though I can't remember the name of the actual virus that infected it. I know it's a tojan, though.  That much I remember) off of my computer without reformatting, I'm going to have to do it.  However, I've run into one other major problem.  When I purchased my computer, my father offered to put my backup disks "in a safe place"... well, now they're so safe, they're safe from *ME*... ugh, this is turning into a nightmare of a problem.

 

Please, please please email me at Archer(at)brotherhoodofobsidian(dot)org if you think you can help me with this.  I have no internet connection at home any longer because whatever this virus is, it's crashing AOL (and yes, I've tried removing AOL and reinstalling it - even an earlier version at one point, at least 7 times and this does NOTHING to help the situation). 

 

My OS is Windows XP, home edition.

My ISP is AOL 9.0 (now it's security edition, not that it matters since it won't load)

My Anti-virus, WAS Norton Anti-virus. I switched to PC-Cillin after Norton couldn't remove this annoying virus, and just removed PC-Cillin in preperation of total wipe of the hard drive ... I think I'm going to have to do it.

I run Spybot S&D (though now that I lack internet connection, I can't update) and Ad-Aware (same thing as with spybot).  I just installed HijackThis!, though without an internet connection, it's pretty worthless.  I also run SpywareBuster (I think that's the name of the program.).

 

Someone *please* help me.  If only to tell me how to get my hands on a fresh set of XP disks.  I'm slowly going out of my mind concerning this!