I'm helping a friend by removing viruses from his computer. There is a owner account which has infected files and for the life of me I can't get rid of them. I keep getting "access is denied". Any ideas on how to remove these files? Is the owner account supposed to be there. All 3 of my computer here at home and the 3 computers i use at work do not have owner accounts. Brian

The Owner profile is the account that's setup originally when XP Home is first booted. It may or may not have a different account name. In order to remove the Virus, you may need to disable System Restore, boot to Safe Mode and use the built-in Administrator account to run the virus scan. Life's more painless for the brainless.

I already tried booting into safemode under admin and it still says "access denied". System restore was already off before I started working on this computer. Brian

You could try Avast antivirus which will scan for the viruses before the pc boots up. If you decide to try this you will get the option to "schedule a boot time scan" after installation. Free AV: http://www.avast.com/eng/download-a...

btklwl, I already had Avast installed in that computer. I first started getting this "access denied" from Avast. Anyway, I got rid of it by doing some registry tweeking. The computer is clean and I returned it to my friend. Brian