On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 17:46:44 -0800, James Stroud <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Four steps, meant to help, really. > > 1. shut down your computer > 2. erase your hard drive > 3. install linux with a firewall > 4. reboot > > You can always run your beloved window$ under vmware. > > Alternately, get a Mac. > > You will never have another problem like this again. The real virus is your > operating system. > > Sorry for the brutally honest and yet ultimately helpful answer. If it angers > you as it does some, well, then you may actually deserve what you get. > > James > > (Living M$ free for 7 years and never been happier.) > >
Based on the mailing lists I've found your name on and the messages there, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that shouting "Don't use windows!" in your general direction would be just beating a dead horse. Unfortunately, I don't know of an easy way to remove unidentified viruses from an already-infected computer. I really doubt there is a five-minute guru answer, and unless you find such a solution, you will probably have to resort to the reformat/reinstall route. You mention that you have already reinstalled, but do not make clear whether or not you reformatted your hard drive first - if the problem is in a file not overwritten by the windows install, it could easily survive a reinstall without a reformat. Short of switching to a different operating system, there are a few steps I can recommend to help defend against malicious attachments and such: 1) Never, ever, ever use Outlook. Outlook Express is almost-but-not-quite as bad. Microsoft made several design decisions to "enhance" the user experience which have resulted in pretty much every email virus and worm, ever. As an email client for people used to Outlook Express, I heartily reccomend Mozilla Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/). 2) Use a good spamfilter to automate the process of sorting out junk from your mail. After a little training, the Bayesian filter built-in to Thunderbird works well enough for my purposes. 3) If you must use windows, firewalling and virus scanning are essential. You seem to already have that part, plus a certain paranoia about attachments that puts you well ahead of the curve. 4) Similar to #1, you should NEVER surf the web in Internet Explorer. Again, this is primarily because Microsoft chose to include features (ActiveX controls in web pages) that have led to an unmanagable number of security problems. Firefox (http://www.getfirefox.com) is a wonderful alternative browser for Windows users, and will be available to you on other platforms if you ever choose to switch to an OS less beleagured by viruses, trojans, and spyware. 5) You seem appropriately paranoid about attachments, although I do have to wonder what kind of message was sent to you that made yo uwant to open "details.txt" in the first place. I think you will appreciate an email client that shows you the file type and asks for confirmation before launching an attachment, just like you might appreciate a web browser that shows the file type and asks for confirmation before launching a downloaded file. 6) With the filename you gave, it shouldn't be that hard to find some notes on this virus with google. 7) When the system is running away with background processes like you describe, use the task manager to find out which process is using the resources. Use this information in your research for a fix. -- Sean Blakey Saint of Mild Amusement, Evil Genius, Big Geek Python/Java/C++/C(Unix/Windows/Palm/Web) developer quine = ['print "quine =",quine,"; exec(quine[0])"'] ; exec(quine[0]) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
