BAD virus. can't open hijack this, firefox or any other apps.

[smeezekitty]

i meanly talk about this part

Very important, do the following immediately or as soon as possible!

If you have done any online transactions, call all of your banks, credit card companies, financial institutions and inform them that you may be a victim of identity theft and to put a watch on your accounts and/or change all of your account numbers.
 
From a clean computer change all of your online passwords including for email, banks, financial accounts, PayPal, eBay, online credit card companies and any online forums or groups you belong to etc.

DO NOT change passwords or do any transactions while using the infected computer. The attacker will get the new passwords and transaction information.

the rest of it is good advice
but still if you back up to a flash drive i am sure the virus can also jump drives
when trying to retreave off the flash drive
so wahts to keep it from infecting another computer?

[evilfantasy]

Read the reply. It's all explained.

[landa321]

would it possibly be good news at all if none of my photos or music files came up as infected in the scan?

i am going to buy a new hard drive tomorrow to transfer these files to. in the meantime, what "action" should i take in the avast scan? should i delete the infected/un-repairable files? they are mostly exe and tmp files. i know my photoshop, office, etc will be shot, but i would prefer that happen than my photos.

by the way, is there any way to salvage my outlook files? old emails, address book, etc?

[evilfantasy]

would it possibly be good news at all if none of my photos or music files came up as infected in the scan?

Yes but I would scan them with another scanner to be sure.

i am going to buy a new hard drive tomorrow to transfer these files to. in the meantime, what "action" should i take in the avast scan? should i delete the infected/un-repairable files? they are mostly exe and tmp files. i know my photoshop, office, etc will be shot, but i would prefer that happen than my photos.

The files that Avast is going to quarantine will make the drive useless because it will remove critical system files needed for Windows to work.

by the way, is there any way to salvage my outlook files? old emails, address book, etc?

You can back them up and do the scans on them also. Although I would think that they are the most likely ones to be infected.

[landa321]

The files that Avast is going to quarantine will make the drive useless because it will remove critical system files needed for Windows to work.

should i go ahead and delete those files then? the drive already doesn't boot up anyway since i did the avira scan. i am more concerned with saving what i can before doing the reformat/fresh install.

You can back them up and do the scans on them also. Although I would think that they are the most likely ones to be infected.

is it possible to back them without starting outlook? can i go in and just copy the file? i am not 100% what folder those files are located in. would those be pst and pab files?

[evilfantasy]

I'm not sure where they are located and I believe they are .PST files.

[landa321]

how about the files? let avast remove them or quarantine?
i know i am eventually going to reformat this drive, but i still feel better getting rid of those files. does it matter?

[evilfantasy]

When you reformat you will be getting rid of them,

[landa321]

I am finally back up on my desktop. I was able to save all of my important files on to a brand new HD and I ran scans on that HD to make sure all the files were safe.

I ended up reformatting an older hard drive that was only 100GB and doing a fresh XP install on that. This way, I can reformat the infected 750GB HD and just use it as external storage. this way, if I get infected in the future, I will have all of my important files backed up. Lesson learned.

Thanks all around.

[printerface]

sometimes spywares are blocking some of our downloads, so you can just close your spyware and download hijack, but if the problem still insist, how about reformatting your computer.

[SuperDave]

sometimes spywares are blocking some of our downloads, so you can just close your spyware and download hijack, but if the problem still insist, how about reformatting your computer.

That's exactly what he/she did.