My wife's computer is possessed

Hello,
My wife has a Dell dimension desktop, with Intel celeron 2.6 Ghz and 1.25 GB of RAM equipped with Windows XP Home, SP2. However this desktop is unusable because of malaware and god know what. I have run lots of programs like ad-aware,ccleaner,counterspy,spybot,regsweeper and xoftspy and still its of no use.

Here are symptons:
It seems to be linked to IE, because one click on IE used to pop up 10+ windows and so I removed IE and still it pops up at times when I use firefox. It takes around 5-6 minutes to boot and it starts out at 100% CPU utilization.
Any application I run takes around 2-4 minutes to even open.

I have painstakingly tried to follow all instructions outlined at "READ and RUN ME" link (with a 100% cpu utilized computer, it takes hours to do this). I have not done the pandascan and bitdefender coz they need IE and I am scared to add IE again to this desktop, but can do it if someone thinks its not risky.

I am attaching counterspy log, getrunkey, shownew and hijackthis log files.

I really hope someone can offer help, or this desktop has to be thrown away coz I have tried everything that I know. Worst thing is a little pop up at bottom right corer(near date) that has a constant pup up stating "your computer is infected, windows has detected spyware infection...." and until I click on it, it keeps popping up over that part of the screen overriding any windows underneath. On clicking it takes me to awola anti spyware program.

Thanks in advance,
Sri

 

Also I tried to attach the newfiles.txt whose size is 619 KB, but the attachment tool complains that it should nto exceed 250KB. What do I do ! ?

 

hi sridhar!
Welcome to Major Geeks!
Please rerun Counterspy and have it fix everything it finds. Then run CCleaner as per the instructions in the Read & Run Me First at this address: http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=35407 and see if that reduces the size of your ShowNew log. Your computer is infected. Can you run the online scans we request? If so, please post the results of those as well.
Either I or someone else will help you further after you post back again.
abri

 

Hi Abri,
I appreciate your offer to help. I tried running the 2 programs plus online scans. With 100% utilized computer it was next to impossible with all the pop ups and sudden restarts. So I decided the best thing was to reformat and reinstall the OS which I just did and life is a lot better

Will keep a much closer eye on my wife's computer henceforth. Thanks for the offer to help.

-Sridhar

 

Hi sridhar_125!
I'm glad the computer is up and working again. I would invite you to look at the How to Protect Yourself from Malware thread here:

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=44525

Thanks for visiting us. Enjoy a look around at the other forums whenever you have time.
abri