Virus!

Aaaaargh! The Girlfriend's PC caught a virus. Somehow, somewhere. I might be slightly responsible for that; me downloading a couple of torrents with her machine might have something to do with it :-$ The point is that, as the tech-guy in the house, I have to find a way to clean the damn thing now. It seems that it's a very resistant kind of virus. AVG can't get rid of it, Spybot can't get rid of it. I am currently browsing in the Intratubes to find a possible cure if possible.

The one extreme solution is to format and install from scratch. The Girlfriend is not very positive on the idea, although it is 100% clear that it will be me who is going to do the whole thing :-)

The other extreme solution is to format and switch to Ubuntu. Last time she saw Ubuntu 7.04 from a liveCD on her PC she liked it. I might try it for a couple of days from the liveCD again and based on her reactions I might convince her to go for it. The good thing with 7.04 is that everything worked out of the box with her laptop. Trackpad, wireless card, 3D graphics, It Just Worked. This gives me hopes, it might not be THAT difficult after all.

On the other hand she might want to practice her Excel skills in the following weeks for her work. While OpenOffice.org is fine and dandy, when it comes to learning the menus and the shortcuts and generally familiarising with Excel, well, by definition, it's not good enough.

We'll see how it goes. In the meantime I'll have to provide practical and psychological support when the infected machine keeps popping up un-requested windows and generally acting on its own...

UPDATE:
I managed to get rid of the trojan eventually. SpyBot spotted the culprit and after a quick look in some forums I spotted the foul entry in the registry that resurrected the thing each time I removed it. I deleted the entry and everything seems normal now. I run a full malware scan (AVG, SpyBot and Microsoft™ Windows™ Defender) every couple of days. Everything looks normal for now, let's hope it stays that way.