~e5.0001 issue

Hello, I have a problem that I believe is some kind of malware, but I can not get rid of it. I have a game called Rome: Total War, that I bought about a month ago, and recently I downloaded a modpack with various utilities in it. I believe one of these utilities put something bad on my computer, because whenever I try to start the game now, it just stops like nothing even happened. In Task Manager, I notice a process named ~e5.0001 that takes up about 95% of processing and seriously slows down my computer if I don't close it. I have read about it on various sites, and apparently it is "copyright protection", but it was never there before and I don't appreciate that it won't allow me to run the game. I read various procedures about removing it, but none worked. So I uninstalled the game, followed all the steps on this site about malware removal, reinstalled and it was still there. I uninstalled again, followed all the steps again, and then someone in the Malware forums told me to get rid of some entries in HJT. These refused to be deleted, and I was told that all my logs are clean. However, this is still one problem: the game won't run!! :mad

I have:
Windows XP Home w/SP 2
512 MB RAM
AMD Sempron Processor 3300+
ATI Radeon 9550 Graphic card

More information and scanning logs are in this thread: http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=114665

Hopefully somebody has had this issue before and knows how to fix it, because I want to keep playing this game and I don't want to reinstall Windows or anything.

 

Yeah, that process is part of their copyright protection. You probably never saw it before because it should only be running when the game is running (unless you noticed it eating your CPU from in-game). A similarly named process runs while I play Battlefield, and sometimes it won't shut down when I close the game, so I have to do it myself since it slows down my system quite a bit.
It was running fine before you got the modpack? Have you removed the modpack, or is that something that happened automatically when you uninstalled the game? Have you made sure the install directory was removed when uninstalling? I've read that sometimes shutting the process down manually will cause the game to stop running, but I haven't read of a guaranteed fix. I would think a restart or reinstall would fix this.
I've never had a problem running games with this process, but I've noticed that it sometimes doesn't want to behave.
Here's a thread related to that process, but with a different game. You might find it useful:
http://forum.eagames.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=25177&view=previous&sid=73d4bf4de02c02b7d25e4d05cbc9ca68

 

alright, thanks, I'll check that out :dood