Malware issues (BO2K?)- downloading, antivirus, performance

Upon reboot, I had a new virus that came in because I made a mistake and put a zone into "trusted" in ZoneAlarm thinking it was from my network when it wasn't. I removed the virus and rebooted again. I am testing the external now.

 

Everything is working great so far. Thanks for all of your help over the past week, chaslang. I owe you tremendously.

 

I'm sorry to resurrect a dead topic, but I'm currently having issues that eclipse my former problems, issues that also start with malware.

I installed ZoneAlarm and Avast! AntiVirus, as well as having Windows Defender running, at the end of the last solution. However, I soon found new problems with my network that were unrelated to malware. I connect to the Internet through a college network, and I found that I was periodically being disconnected from the network for a few seconds at a time, for no particular reason (I would later learn through observation of the events log that for some reason I was being booted off of my IP; more on that later).

Eventually, having had enough of this, I called the networking administrators. Trying to think of a solution, we decided I should look through the ZoneAlarm firewall log. In it, I saw communications being blocked that involved my computer and various DNS services and addresses on *******.***.edu domains. I was told to attempt to put these addresses in the Trusted Zone to stop the disconnects.

This didn't fix the problem, and a few hours later Avast! warned me that a virus had been detected. I wish I had taken down the name of the virus, but I didn't. It was masked as the process C:/WINDOWS/avast! av.exe. I promptly instructed Avast! to delete the virus. It then said that an operating system restart was required, but I was busy at the time and instructed it to "restart later."

However, a scant 45-60 minutes later, a system-services-like popup window appeared, instructing me that the computer was rebooting. I panicked but couldn't close the window; I didn't have enough time to try and kill it from Task Manager.

Upon reboot (and approximately 40 subsequent reboots), the computer will not start Windows. I receive the following error in text:

Code:

NTLDR not found.
Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart

As you can imagine, this makes it impossible for me to directly perform changes through Windows.

At some point, I made a disk containing Bart PE and Winternals ERD Commander 2005, so I have accesses to the services offered by these two programs. I am using the former's internet browser to type this post. The latter's Events Log let me see both why I was being disconnected (see above) and the alert that caused the reboot. Full text of that alert is below.

I am aware that I made an enormous mistake by putting the school addresses in the 'trusted zone,' and in hindsight this should have set off all sorts of alarms (college networks? secure?), but at this point the question that concerns me more is- is there anything I can do to rescue the computer?

Thanks in advance for your reply, and I'm sorry to waste your time yet again.