A Tough Week

It has been a tough week for me computer wise.  I have been able to do very little since last Saturday night, especially when it came to doing anything on the internet.

It all started late Saturday night.  One of the blogging communities that I belong to is Entrecard.  While visiting a number of blogs and dropping my card on the various Entrecard widgets, my McAfee popped up and said it had found and deleted the Vundo Trojan.  It popped up a couple of times.  I wish I could remember the site, but I think it was a technology blog.

Anyway, McAfee was not able to clear out the Vundo.  These days, I primarily am using Google Chrome for my internet browsing.  Well I would be happily cruising the web when all of a sudden Internet Explorer would open up and bog my system down.  I spent the bulk of Sunday downloading various spyware scanners trying to remove it.  I thought that I had it licked when I started using STOPzilla, which had a good review on Cnet.com.  It identified the virus several times and said that it had been removed.  

Monday and Tuesday, I was able to get onto the web without any issues.  However, Wednesday night I fired up the laptop and all of a sudden STOPzilla said Vundo was back.  Curses!  I kept struggling with my system for the rest of the week.  Since the virus kept opening up Internet Explorer, I removed it from my system.  However, pesty bug that Vundo is, it kept opening up IE. Finally, on Saturday, after my system had become very unstable, I considered taking the drastic step of recovering my system back to the original settings.  Before I did, though, I called STOPzilla's tech support for advice.  They suggested running the scan in safe mode.

So Saturday night, I get home from delivering pizza and fire up the laptop in safe mode.  Lo and behold, STOPzilla would not start on my computer in safe mode.  I decided at that point to run a couple of scans while under safe mode.  I did a complete system scan with McAfee and with Spybot.  The scans finally finished about 2 a.m. this morning.  Both identified several files with the virus and I was able to delete them.  That seems to have done the trick (knock on wood.)   Hopefully this is the end of my Vundo experience.