Possible virus infection - can't run antispywares.

Hi, Im trying to solve a problem on my bf's computer, he's even less tech savy than I am.. I'm typing this from my own, currently working, computer.

Anyway, I read the read & run me first, of course, the computer has more than 80GB left of space, has only mcafee as av, and no firewall besides the windows one (he says). the computer was fine yesterday, the problems started today at start up, the task bar reverted to grey, while it had XP family theme, nothing has been changed lately, no new microsoft updates as far as we know.

When you open windows or programs, they don't appear in the task bar. Internet is not working, the network connections are all gone. Search and help do not work, you see the dog but the window it black and you can't search anything. I ran ccleaner properly, can't run malwarebytes (deinstalled it and installed a new version keep getting the vbalsgrid6.ocx error) can't run spywaredoctor cause I need to update it first wich is impossible cause there's no internet connection, can't run a system restore it keeps saying it is not possible, safe mode doesn't help. I tried this, haven't found any of the ones on the list. mcafee doesn't start up either. I did a /scannow, it didn't fix anything.. I'm running out of ideas, and he doesn't have a recovery disk by hand (which he should) so I was wondering if there's anything I am missing, and that I could try? I think it's weird this all happened over night. I've been googling and trying things for half a day, and can't get it fixed this time. Would it be useful to try to get a HJT log?

thanks in advance.

 

Hi thanks for replying, mcafee is indeed his antivus, we just heared there has been a problem with the update, so I'm going to check now if it is related to mcafee, hopefully I can fix it this way.

 

Hi TimW, I read the Mcafee solution, wa a bit tricky since I could not copy and paste, I ended up deleting the DAT folder as suggested and putting my svchost file into a compressed file so I could just extract it into the right folder, since I couldn't copy and paste, and it fixed it.. he only needs to change a few settings apparently. anyway, thank you very much for your time!