what malware installs floppy device driver?

Hi all!

What malware installs floppy device driver? And after unstalling the driver using the device manager, just reinstalls it at next system boot?

On Aug 11, my desktop machine running Vista (64-bit Ultimate Edition) unexpectedly showed me a pop-up window advising me that a floppy disk drive controller/driver had been installed and that my pc needed a reboot. This pc doesn't even have a physical floppy drive! In any case, the drive letter A: now showed up after the reboot, but something else happened with this first reboot - my BIOS gave me a message at boot time saying that the configuration of the motherboard needed verifying. When I went through the boot list it now had listed a floppy drive as the first boot device - and I repeat once again that this pc has never had a floppy drive (and obviously still does not have one)!

What was I doing on the pc when this happened? Besides revisiting some web pages that I regularly review and reading my email, I was working through some excel spreadsheets.

Also, for the very first time I had used the 'save' hotkey on my Logitech wireless keyboard, the one with the 3 1/2" diskette symbol on it.

This immediately made me think that somehow the Logitech software was installing the floppy or diskette driver. I got in touch with them and uninstalled the Setpoint software as they suggested. Their technical support told me that if the problem went away with their software uninstalled, then obviously they were causing it. On the other hand if the problem persisted without their software then their software was not the culprit.

So I uninstalled their software, uninstalled the floppy device driver, rebooted the system - and the floppy driver just reinstalled itself right at Vista startup. I've now redone this many times in different order with the same result.

I've searched for references to this problem with no luck, and am at a loss at what to do. Before doing a clean install, I wanted to check here to see if anyone can shed some light on what is happening as I fear that if I do a clean install I may just find myself back in the same situation because I have no idea of what is causing this floppy/diskette driver to keep on reinstalling itself.

Thanks in advance to anyone that can explain what is happening!

Regards to all,
MH

 

Thanks TimW!

The BIOS did have a legacy diskette enabled, so I disabled it. (The guy who built the system told me that he may have mistakenly left it enabled after updating the motherboard firmware.)

Now I'm trying to make sure no malware got into the system and to do this I am trying to trackdown whether it was the excel or logitech bug that installed this controller.

The problem I have is that everytime I enable the diskette in BIOS, Vista loads the driver, so I'm unable to get back to the original config to track down the cause of this controller install.

Would you have any suggestions?

 

Because I would like to know what application installed the floppy driver.

It's odd that an Excel spreadsheet or a Logitech keyboard application would install a floppy driver and I would like to confirm which one it is and report it as a bug. There's a loss of confidence in a product that botches up something so basic as a hardware driver (even if enabled in BIOS there is no physical drive so there should be no hardware detected), but if I can repeat the whole process at least I'll have reason to believe the system isn't compromised.

If it isn't either one of them, then what? Better safe than sorry so assume the system has been compromised.

And to help others that may be searching for a virus or viruses, worm, Trojan etc that installs a diskette or floppy driver for hardware that doesn't exist, what better place than here so that it gets indexed by search engines and into the public domain?