Windows Vista verification

HP Laptop: My mom (84) let her anti-virus program (Avast!) expire and kept on using the internet for I-don't-know-how-long. She didn't understand that her e-mail and favorite websites weren't "on her computer" but on the internet. They are, after all, icons on her desktop. Sigh. Anyway, I re-installed the anti-virus and ran a check but the next day (today) the computer quit working except to get a warning screen saying the there has been an unauthorized change to Windows and to click here for more information on-line or click this other button to close down--which shuts the computer off. When you click to learn more on-line it takes you to a Microsoft website and and begins "Windows Validation." So far this has been running for several hours with no results. You can access other websites while this is running, but you can't do anything else with the computer. The Start toolbar at the bottom of the screen isn't there, and there is no way to access any of the computer's programs or its hard drive. I've never seen this before. Help!
Keith

 

This sounds dodgy to me. Are you sure it's a legitimate MS website? As far as I know, MS doesn't do this type of thing. Normally it's you who has to initiate the validation process. I think you need to visit the malware forum and start reading the instructions for scanning your machine for malware.

 

I ended up having to do a system restore to get the computer to run. Then today, 2 weeks later, it does the same thing. This time there's no question that her anti-virus has expired--it hasn't, it's only been installed a couple of weeks. This time is different though since it let me boot into safe mode. Once I did that I was able to re-boot into normal mode and it's running normally once again. I have no idea what she's doing that's causing this. Her usual computer routine is to log into Juno for her e-mail and use the e-mail Facebook notifications to log onto Facebook. She has a variety of sites that she goes to.
Any ideas?
Keith

 

Just a follow-up: This has occurred on three of six computers I'm responsible for--so far--my mother's, my wife's and now mine. With Mom's, as noted, we went to the web site indicated to try and fix it and ended up having to do a system restore. When it happened with my wife's, I hit ESC when booting, selected the hard drive to boot from, and it came up just fine. No Malware or etc., showed up in multiple scans--but it's happened twice. Same thing when it happened on my computer, although it's only happened once. I'm beginning to think that Spybot S&D inadvertently changes something in the registry or possibly in a windows program that pulls the trigger on this problem. Any thoughts?
Keith