Ok, this might take a while. First, I have windows XP SP3. A couple weeks ago, i went online and started to download the new world of warcraft trailer ( i searched for it on google) with the blizzard download thing ( i never actually went to the blizzard website) even though I have never played the game, i was just really bored and I heard that the trailer was amazing. I have in the past used this downloader before. However, that was
before I had norton antivirus. I had used it before to download the world of warcraft free trial version or something and to help the download speed it said to just allow it in windows firewall, which I did and everything was fine. However, when i downloaded this trailer, It said that it was going slow because it saw that I had a firewall up (norton antivirus). So, being the stupid person that I am, I temporarily disabled the firewall (I completely turned it off). At this point, the only thing I was doing on my computer was downloading this, I don't think i was on the internet, I was possibly on google. When I turned off the firewall though, all of a sudden my screen flashed and it came back. My desktop wallpaper had changed though. It said "alert your computer may be infeted with viruses or spyware, please download windows something 2008" or something like that. I did not change the wallpaper, and it just appeared about 2 seconds after I turned off the firewall. The download was still going, but I stopped it and turned the firewall back on. But, when I right clicked on my desktop to go to properties and to change my wallpaper back to what it was supposed to be, I only got 3 display tabs in the properties menu when I should have gotten about 5 i think, i can't remember. So at this point, the problem was that I could not change my desktop background anymore (not a big deal but I was pretty sure that I had a virus or something because it had never done that before and I did not tell it to change the wallpaper). So I went online and searched for a fix and I read about a related problem on some help forum I can't remember what it was though. Anyways it was somehting about a .exe that was installed that was a bad program or spyware, and that if you delete it or something then it would fix the problem. Well I found the .exe it was like some random letters and there was one number in it. I searched for the .bmp of the desktop wallpaper and found the exact same name for the .bmp as the .exe that I was told to search for and delete, that would fix the probelm. So I deleted all those, and i also did a regedit in start>run and deleted a WINdesktopwallpaper and something else, those were to fix the desktop wallpaper problem. I can't remember if I did anything else, but doing that fixed the problem and I got my desktop back. However, now I really cannot get onto the internet. My Internet connection hasn't been that good for the past day but that isn't a problem. Right now I'm on a different computer. When I try to open up firefox or internet explorer,
sometimes I am able to get to the homepage which is google, of course. However, my internet is extremely slow, but it is not on any of the other computers. When I type something into google, it will take a long time and it will say "reading from google.com" or loading or something like that. Anyways, it comes back with search results. I will click on a link and when I click it, automatically, a new tab will open in my browser, rather than it taking me to the link I cilcked on. The new tab will say something like "connecting to 64.101.155" or some random address like that in the lower left hand corner of my screen. Anyways, it will show some random number and it will usually bring up some advertisement site or fake site about whatever i searched on. The only time I can really get to a search result is if I highlight the address that comes up in google when i get the results, and put it into my address bar, but then it just goes slow still and doesn't connect. Now, really the only way I can even get to my internet is by going to start > run and going to C:\ blah balh firefox.exe. Then that brings up the homepage fast, but i run into the same problem above with slow internet and everything. I ran norton scans and lavasoft's ad aware 2007 free version scan at least once everyday and they don't find a lot of stuff, at least they haven't fixed the problem I'm having. I tried downloading another program such as spybot s&d or stopzilla, but I can't get on the internet to do that. If I did, however manage to install it, it would say that the .exe doesn't work or something. Also, trying to update any of my ad aware programs or norton would not work. Basically I couldn't connect to the internet through anything. My computer did not recognize a printer that was plugged directly into it thorugh usb. I tried running disk defragment on my C: drive (main drive) and it said that the drive was unavailiable. The Disk defragment can however, detect another external hard drive that I have. Also, I tried many times downloading anti spyware programs ontot another computer and putting them onto a disk and putting them onto my pc but the program would not start, or install to my pc, or update correctly or anything. I did actually get spybot S&D to run ONCE on my computer, and it found some stuff that the ad aware scan did not but it still didn't fix my problem. So basically I can't connect to the internet, get updates to anything, and the main hard drive is undetectable by disk defragmenter. I can't think of anything else that I have done to try and fix this problem at the moment but I will try and post that later. Also, my computer has become VERY slow when restarting/rebooting and twice now it has done a random shutdown where it says that a system restart has been started by NT SYSTEM AUTHROITY or something like that. Also, Norton cannot optimize the C: drive either or clean up the registry for it.
All this has been very frustrating and I'm trying to fix it, I can understand if you don't want to read all this, but I would GREATLY appreciate any help that anyone might have for whatever problem this many be. I'm assuming that it is a virus/spyware but I don't know. Thanks for any help!
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