microsoft anti-spyware ate my drivers

hey everyone. thanks in advance for any help. here's the problem-
following instructions in your guys' pre-HJT "Basic Spyware, Trojan And Virus Removal tutorial", i downloaded and ran microsoft anti-spyware and, per instructions, allowed it to fix all that it found. it found one thing- C:\WINDOWS\hosts -which it labeled as spyware, and noted, "possible hosts file hijack". now it seems as though i have no drivers for my soundcard. i try to play a song in winamp and i get the message: DirectSound output v.2.42(d) error \ Bad DirectSound driver \ error code 88780078. and sure enough, when i went into control panel to check out my sound devices, it lists none..
i'm running windows xp sp1 and here's my 'specs' as read off the tower-
emachines 2.53gHz 256K L2 cache 533MHz FSB intel celeron d processor 325, 256MB RAM i hope that makes sense.
-jim

 

Give the below a try...

Please download HOSTER and then follow the below steps.

• Unzip HOSTER to a convenient folder such as C:\Hoster

• Run Hoster.exe, click Restore Original Hosts and then click OK.

• Click the X to exit the program.

 

it doesn't seem to have worked. still no music comin' out of my speakers, and i don't see any new C:\WINDOWS\hosts, either. any other ideas?

 

Get me a current HJT log so I can check something, you should have HOSTS in C:\WINDOWS. It should only be in C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\etc\hosts.

Anything else would be malware related most likely.

 

my roommate took it upon himself to reinstall windows, so i'm good. thanks for your efforts.
-jim

 

Sorry to hear he had to reinstall.

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