To make a long story short, I somehow managed to get bombarded with many forms of malware included trojans, worms, dialers, rogue programs, spyware, and so on all at once that somehow managed to slip by my Kaspersky Internet Security and disabled it or deleted it or something.
Of the most prominent problems, I had "Security Tool" and "Windows System Defender" (which I'll call WSD) install themselves on my computer. Supposedly, they're gone. I manually found Security Tool in my computer via a shortcut icon it placed on my desktop and after running a-squared, WSD's shortcut is now gone, leading me to think it left too. But I still have a number of problems.
The most recognized at the moment are:
1) Kaspersky doesn't start when I reboot.
2) I cannot boot in Safe Mode.
3) Task Manager will not open.
4) Last I checked, I had a Trojan attached to explorer.exe and more in other places.
5) A-squared and Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware (which was supposed to be for WSD) have broken shortcuts and Spyware Doctor (which was for Security Tool) will not run. A-squared did run yesterday but the shortcut is broken today.
Currently, I have my computer disconnected from the internet and the rest of my home network. Does anyone know where I can start t untangle this disastrous string of malware?
And since It's probably necessary to know, I'm running Windows XP on that computer.