got a nasty malware, virus on my pc

[gavkiwi]

  aaaarrgghh, my wife was downloading some 'Sims 2' addons from a site, and got a really nasty virus on the computer from one of the files

Whenever she loads a program she gets this error msg 'Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.

She got that when trying to run moezilla/firefox & the Sims 2.

So I had her run our AVG anti virus s/w, and its found that every exe.file in (c:programfiles) has been infected. WTH

the first thing AVG found in the scan was this file 'dll6wise.dll'

AVG is still scanning at this moment, Im not by the comp right now, I told her to run a FULL avg scan and to run our spyware program, im not sure how malicious this file is?

anyone come across a similar error, is this a big deal, or an easy fix

I really dont want to have to re-install the OS, and start from scratch

Gav

[quarterback]

Sorry to hear about that.  I got 'bit' a while back myself, just by visiting a webpage (and not having updated & protected my IE/XP installations)

Ad aware, spybot & HijackThis would be my recommendations.  See the following two pages.  These are people who will analyze your HijackThis log and they each have step by step 'cleansing' instructions.

http://forum.tweakxp.com/forum/Topic4303-29-1.aspx

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic34773.html

[AlanS17]

Sorry to hear that, dude. I have never used anti-viruses because I hate the way they slow down a machine and get their fingers into every little thing. I haven't gotten a virus in over 10 years, though. It's just a matter of being careful.

If you're able to identify the virus, you can often find free virus removal tools online. And I don't mean something that merely destroys the virus. I mean tools that actually reverse the effects for the particular virus in question. Norton used to keep such tools available for the top offending viruses at any given moment, though I'm not sure if they still do that. It was all free, though. It's definitely worth checking out.

[gavkiwi]

well,    its not as bad as I had thought, most of the damage was fixed/taken care of. However this virus decided to infect every freakin exe file on my computer, my AVG anti virus contained the virus, and all the infected exe files, but whats happened is all the short cuts in start/programs for the exe for the programs I use, about 70-75% of them are missing for all the programs, what a dam PITA.

Ive been messing with it for a while now, and I cant figure out how to fix the start/programs short cut deal

the programs do work though, if I goto the exe file directly in windows file explorer, my PC seems to be running as well as it did before, no slow down, games are running good, just this minor inconvienience, lol minor 

I have done spysweeper, spybot and adaware scans. I think im as clean as I can be for now

 Short of going to my last restore point, or backing up all my crap to a 250 GB external USB HD, and re-formatting everything, I dont really know what to do, ugh again what a PITFA. 

Gav

[cdbrown]

Be sure to run an online scan because if the tools you've got on the machine are compromised, chances are it's not removing everything and it will continually be reinfected. Any of these

[Tiger-Heli]

Can't you just right-click on the .exe - select "Create Shortcut", delete the start menu one and replace with the new one?  (Or are you trying to find a way to automate this?)

Or am I missing some detail?

[gavkiwi]

well I fixed the missing exe's by going to c:doc & settings, and re-adding them that way, it took about 20-30mins, not too bad...the only thing I have not done is run an online scan, thanks for the link above I will check that out 

Gav