@#^$

[un4]

I'm pissed.

Last night, I was using my laptop to catch up on two weeks of webcomics.  I notice that IE is running slowly, so I bring up the task manager to see what is going on.  Turns out, my CPU is running at 100% and I have six more processes going than I should (yeah, I check these things), and the new ones have great names like "d.exe" and "g.exe" and are sucking up all my processing power.  Not liking this, I nuke the processes, disable my wifi, lock down my firewall, set security settings to their maximums, and start a virus/spyware scan and a separate spyware/malware scan.  Turns out, one of the adds in the comics dropped a charming little bundle called "Spy-Agent.bw!mem" into my lap.  It's a trojan and a keylogger, but doesn't do a whole lot.  Nevertheless, I give my AV the go-ahead to nuke the living  out of little spy-agent.  It cycles through and removes all five infected files that both scans turned up.

So, everything's just fine and dandy now.  I restart in safe mode... and can't log on.  One of the files that was modified (and in theory restored to the default after being cleaned) was the "userinit" file at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon... I know enough about computers to know that I don't want to play around with these things, so I let the professional programs take care of them for me.  Now it turns out that I probably should have restored it myself.  Now I have to find my Windows disks (did I mention that I got this laptop in 2007?  No clue where the hell those things are) and hope the repair utility can fix my winlogon.

Edit: have I mentioned how much I miss DOS?

[Lyte]

Sorry to hear about your troubles    Hope you are able to get it all worked out.

[un4]

Thanks, Lyte.


All I need to do is change the winlogon so that it reads:

Code Select Expand

c:\Windows\system32\userinit.exe

but I can't access the command prompt without logging in... which I can't do without the disks.  Anyone know of a way to do that?  Dell apparently doesn't.

[Tony]

Hiren's boot cd should get you to a command prompt, but you need to download it, burn it etc....

[KittyPurple]

I notice that IE is running slowly,

There's your problem! Hope it gets worked out for you.

BTW what comic/ad caused it?

[Trismus]

Life was simpler when a sledgehammer was the solution to everything