malware???

Most people are under the very mistaken misconception that HijackThis is a scanning and detection tool. It is not! HijackThis is simply a tool that is used to identify browser hijackers and in some cases it will show entries for some malware that is for instance running at startup. A HijackThis log shows the following:

• a running process list with no reference to good or bad
• it lists the contents of a selected group of registry keys that is an an extremely small subset of the tens of thousands of keys that may exist. Again no reference to good or bad.
• and some of the above keys that are shown may show some non-Microsoft system services that are running. Again with no reference to good or bad.

The decision on what is good or bad is left a person with significant Windows and malware cleaning experience.

HijackThis does not come close to showing all malware that could be hiding on a PC. Anyone who has an infected computer and is relying on HijackThis without the benefit of running other scans such as Spybot, Windows Defender, BitDefender & Panda, CCleaner, etc. are more than likely still infected. In most cases, where there is one virus/trojan there are more.

The goal of this forum is to remove all malware, and this cannot be done properly by just seeing a HijackThis log.


Thus newbielee, if you really want to know if your PC is free of malware, the READ & RUN ME needs to be run. The choice to run it is yours. If you just finished a format and are not having any malware problems, you should probably be okay if you reinstalled from uninfected media and also if everything you reinstalled was also not infected. What we can see from your HJT log is that you need to install a real firewall because the firewall in WinXP SP2 is not adequate.

 

Not true. While having a hardware firewall is great, you still really need a software firewall which provides an added layer of protection against things that a hardwire firewall will just pass thru. A hardware firewall will typically treat any kind of traffic traveling from the local network out to the Internet as safe, which can sometimes be a problem. All malware has to do is hook itself into an application on your PC like your email program, your browser,....etc and the hardware firewall will never notice it.

 

You're welcome.

Make sure you only allow it to install the free firewall. Do not install the full internet security suite especially if you already have your own antivirus application installed.