Need help removing malware on Windows 8.1 machine

Hello:

I am having problems with my Dell Inspiron laptop belonging to my wife that is running Windows 8.1.

First, I have gone through all of the steps as described in the "Read and Run Me First" thread, and I have created all of the necessary logs and attached to this message.

The symptoms of the problems we are having are as follows: Recently (i.e. during the past 2 - 3 weeks) we have been noticing problems within Internet Explorer. At times it has gotten very slow when navigating to a new page; at other times it will simply not navigate at all when clicking on targets within web pages. Ultimately at times IE freezes altogether, and I must use the task manager to end the IE application. We have taken to using Google Chrome in the meantime, which seems to be behaving.

Yesterday, I received a notice on my main e-mail account from our provider, CenturyLink, that my wife's e-mail account (which is the one being used on the infected Inspiron laptop) had been disabled and suspended by the provider, because that e-mail account had been sending numerous spam messages. After some time on the phone with CenturyLink tech support, they suggested that the Inspiron laptop was likely infected by a virus or malware. FYI, we are using Microsoft Outlook 2007 on the laptop, and I am suspecting that the spam e-mails were generated and sent using the Outlook program.

One other problem that I encountered today while running through the steps in "Read & Run Me First", is that when I went to disable UAC, I could not access the Control Panel at all. The only thing that would come up is a blank Control Panel window with nothing in it, and the window could not be closed, resized, minimized, etc. In the end I had to boot to safe mode in order to access the Control Panel and disable UAC.

Please let me know if there is any other information I can provide, and please let me know if I have missed attaching any of the logs. Thanks very much in advance for any help you can provide.

Scott Bryce

 

Thanks for your reply. I have re-run Hitman; it found and quarantined one piece of malware. However the problems continue to persist on the laptop. So I am now preparing to go ahead and restore the laptop to its factory settings and reload my software and apps. Thanks again for looking into this for me.