Bizarre virus problem

Azaran on 5/4/2011 at 03:32

Hi. A friend of mine asked me to take a look at this strange virus infection on his PC (running Vista). The virus has disabled the antivirus he had installed, and when I reinstalled it, it still wouldn't work. I was able to discover that the virus file is lxb.exe (when I ran the task manager, and then double-clicked on the antivirus this process popped up immediately.). First I figured I could just terminate the process, find the file on the hard drive and delete it (I've done it before)....
But here's the strangest problem: when I do a search for that particular file, the search doesn't run at all. If I search for any other file, it begins to search normally, showing the progress bar, but as soon as I type lxb it refuses to search. Disabling the process does nothing either, and I found no other suspicious processes running in the task manager. Does anyone know what we can do in this case, short of having to fork out money for repairs?

Al_B on 5/4/2011 at 06:47

It can be very hard to remove some viruses from an infected copy of Windows while running that copy of Windows. You'll need to have access to another computer but the easiest first step is to write an anti-virus rescue CD such as the(http://support.kaspersky.com/viruses/rescuedisk) Kaspersky one (although there are (http://www.techmixer.com/free-bootable-antivirus-rescue-cds-download-list/) others available). Boot from the CD on the infected computer and it should scan the Windows installation without the virus interference.

Azaran on 6/4/2011 at 04:28

Ok thanks a lot. I burned a rescue disk. I'll have a go at it tomorrow.