my friend is having major comp problems and without being there to help, im trying to help online. She has a virus, no doubt, but none of the scanners are picking it up and she cant get into safe mode to scan. she ran adaware, online scans and i had her shut off system restore. The issues she is having are that internet explorer is locking up and its not showing that its running in the task manager, so she cant shut it off that way. also while this is locked anything else she opens locks up. she did a defrag and all the scans that she could, also a disk cleanup and ran dr pc. any suggestions on what she might do? XP Home sp2., Compaq Presario SR1330NX, 512mb ram, AMD Athlon, LAN

try system restore prior to date of errors occuring , run drwatson to check for errors or conflicts, ask what programs she ran/installed prior to error, try disabling if any,... ...may not be a virus, if she can't get into safe mode(f8), try reinstalling/repairing iexplorer from add/remove or system info tools,also check msconfig, to disable any unknown startup files, empty temp folder, temporarly turn off firewalls and antivirus scans, check with toolbarcop for any BHO plugins,...:)