A virus? Or something else...

Hey guys, I have a desktop that suddenly isn't cooperating. Here's my specs:

AMD 64 3000+ Venice
1 GB RAM
Windows XP Pro

I've been using avast! anti-virus for about six months now and I really like it. The last time my PC was working correctly, avast! came up and said it had found a virus. It finds "malware" fairly frequently. I assumed this was the same thing... Obviously it wasn't. I told it to put it in the Virus Chest (from what I understand, this is like the quarantine option available on other anti-viruses, and this is what avast! always recommends.)

Well, I put it in the virus chest and my computer worked fine, playing some CS:S, checked my email, etc and then I shut my computer down and I went to sleep. Now when I turn my PC on, the Windows logon screen comes on, I type in my password and it doesn't load any of my systray icons. avast! is usually the first one it loads, but it just sits there. When I have the cursor ABOVE the task bar, it is just the regular white arrow, but when I hover over any part of the task bar, it becomes the hour glass. When I do CTRL+ALT+DEL and go to the processes tab, it says that systemidle is using 99% of my CPU and 16K of my system memory.

I assume that because of the recent virus find that that is what it is, but I can't figure out how to fix it. I have tried safe mode, safe mode with networking and with command prompt, and I've tried the "debugging mode" that advanced startup options offers. I am unable to do anything other than login as far as Windows goes.

Is there a way to run a virus scan without being in Windows? I miss my PC

Thanks guys,
Cody

 

Halo,

Thanks for you help. I had already solved the problem before I got your reply, but just in case anyone else needs the reference, I'll list what I did.

I went into Safe Mode with Command Prompt and ran my anti-virus from the command line. It searched 800,000 files and found a trojan. (Dang, that's a lot of files. I should format I deleted that virus and it still hung on bootup. I scanned again, but it found nothing.

Then I booted up in Safe Mode with CP again and I ran Spybot and Ad-Aware from the command line. What do you know, that solved my problem

So to anyone who is having their system freeze when the desktop loads, I definitely suggest running Ad-Aware or Spybot from the command prompt. It took about 5 minutes to do both and it solved my problem, whereas the virus scan took about an hour and solved nothing, though that may not always be the case, I'd suggest spyware removal first for future reference.

Thanks again, though, Halo