Can't Get Rid of Infected Attachments

A few days ago I had a virus on my computer. I don't know what it was but it apparently disabled all my malware, spyware, trojan, and virus scanners. It went to a blue screen that warned me that Windows XP is closing down to save damage and to follow steps to fix. Then it dumped my memory and rebooted. Everytime I tried to run any programs at all it would go back to this screen. Restore did not solve the problem and I could not get online to run scanners. Safemode didn't solve the problem either. My only alternative was to reformat my hard drive and reinstall Windows XP.

Now I have all my software in place and did all my updates for Windows, etc. I am using AVGFree and Comodo Firewall until I can get something better. I no longer trust any software that I own because it did not protect my computer from this. I also use Ad-Aware SE Personal, A-squared, and Spybot.

The problem I am having now is that my email (Mozilla Thunderbird) appears to have the same attachment (1.2) on almost all of my messages. These messages don't usually have attachments and it concerns me because they are all the same. I suspect that I had the new worm that can make it look as though a trusted sender sent the attachment. I may have opened one of these thinking it was safe. But that was before I reinstalled my OS and I have to wonder why they are still attached to my messages.

AVG scanned these messages but stated they were all virus free but if I look at the bottom of the messages that have the attachment it is different than the messages from the unaffected messages.

(unaffected messages)
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.375 / Virus Database: 267.15.11/264 - Release Date: 2/17/2006

(affected messages)
The original MIME headers for this attachment are:
Content-Type: text/plain; x-avg=cert; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Description: "AVG certification"

My question is do I still have a virus? If so why was it carried over to a fresh reinstalled Windows XP? Is it safe to follow the links in these messages? Is my email address corrupt?

Sheart

 

If your AV doesnt detect anything I wouldn't think your still infected. However if your e-mails are stored on a mail server online they could be saved there. If your are using something like Outlook Express and reinstalled then anything infected would be gone unless you imported from a backup.

 

Since I don't use Thunderbird I'm not familiar with it, I have been informed that AVG uses a proxy server to protect the email in that configuration and it adds the attachment to show that it has been scanned and is clean.