Hi; I'm going to be seeing if I can help a freind clean up his system tomorrow, but wanted some advice before starting. He has a P4, XP, probably 256mb memory, and his kids use it a lot, need I say more!! His complaint is that it's ground to a halt, and he can't actually access the net now, at least his browser just won't open. I'm thinking adware, spyware maybe even virus. He had an a/v program, didn't like it, thinks he uninstalled it, bought norton, and now he may be having conflicts with that as well. Sounds like a mess to me. So, my plan of attack is to take my cd of antispyware programs, and things like asquared, cwshredder, etc. (won't be able to d/l since he can't access the net) with me, and try to clean it up. A couple of questions though: 1) I'm assuming it's necessary to boot up in safe mode. But what if even then you still can't maneuver to access these programs (may not even be able to access cd in safe mode). How do you start cleaning things you can't even access? 2) Similarly, a lot of forums talk about doing online scans as part of a comprehensive clean-up, and again, what do you do if you can't actually access the net? Thanks in advance

Who knows all what's there, especially with kids involved. You did say the client is a friend, so rather than spend two days chasing your tail since you are not getting paid to do this, wipe the drive clean and start them on fresh install. Lest I forget, install all the necessary tools within your arsenal before you leave the system at their mercy, they'll never thank you enough for the favor. Do not type anything in this space.

Sabertooth, ditto M2 If at first you don't succeed, you're about average.

Thanks Sabertooth, and Mechanix2go.....will see how bad it is, and let you know the results. Cheers! Swinny

If it's really near death, you can always jerk the drive out, jumper it to 'slave', temporarily stick it in a healthy, well-armed machine as a second drive, and throw all your weapons at it. This way, the drive is helpless to resist, even if it's barely bootable. I can't tell you how much time and brain-damage this trick has saved me over the years. Good luck!

Reformatting would be my last resort. Put these on a CD (d/l on another machine)and go to town: Just try Adaware SE Personal Spyware Blaster CWShredder Spybot S&D Also try an on-line scan at: On-line Spyware Scan Business as usual