Lol I seem to remember someone on this topic telling me CCleaner is worthless in this situation
It was worthless since he had a MBR rootkit.
CCleaner was suggested
after the computer was declared clean from malware as a set of final steps- it of course does not in and of itself clean any malware infections, especially not MBR viruses.
In any case, regardless of the quality of advice offered by non-malware specialists, people seeking help are advised that they follow such advice at their own risk- And, generally, such advice should only be given before a malware expert has responded to the thread (An ideal example of which is to point the person seeking help to the
malware removal guide, which also helps the malware expert that comes along as they won't need to do the same thing, and it gives the person something to do as they wait for said expert), responses made after a malware expert has "taken the case" so to speak is generally considered rude regardless of the quality of such advice.
If you really want to provide malware removal assistance, though:
http://www.computerhope.com/forum/index.php/topic,57605.0.htmlAlso, don't take it personally, as I said, it's not a declaration that your advice isn't sound- it's merely to protect the visitor from various cases where a non-experts advice can make the problem worse- the visitor has no way to judge good or bad information- if they could do that they could likely solve the issue on their own - so the suggestions given to the visitor in the "read before..." thread is to take all posts from non-malware experts with a grain of salt.
personally, I kind of consider the "computer viruses and spyware" forum more or less the territory of the malware experts. Being that they are shortstaffed (as usual
) it does help to make sure posters run through the malware guide and post their logs, since that is almost always the first step required in order to gain information about the "victim" machine, but other then that (and stuff I'm 100% certain is causing the issue) I myself refrain from posting as I have learned through several posts that I can't read logs from computers other then my own very well at all- since unlike with my own PC I haven't a clue what hardware and software environment the log was generated under.
Another point of note is seemingly useless "informational" posts. To draw another analogy from myself, I once posted a large rant about Javascript not being Java and blah blah blah- this post wasn't addressed at all but I thought about it shortly afterward and realized that I was being more annoying then informational. the experts, after all, know what they are doing and have a very high success rate at removing malware, and my little speel likely did nothing but confuse the poor soul trying to receive help.
EDIT:
why do I always start posting before somebody else, but then somebody else posts something else that essentially sums up what I say... lol
