Hi I wonder if anyone can help me - I have so many problems with my computer at the moment I don't know where to start ... (1) First, and most importantly, I can't open norton anti-virus or run live update. When I click on the icon, the hourglass stays for a few seconds and then vanishes and nothing opens. (2) An unwanted webpage opens alongside my homepage whenever I log onto the internet (3) Whenever I download a word document from my email, a message tells me that there is a malicious script error in "iexplore.exe" and I have to close internet explorer. (4) Now (this is recent) I can't click on anything in Microsoft Word without the application freezing. (5) I went to check my registry edit, but the window only stays open for a fraction of a second before closing. (6) I downloaded "hijack this" but the same thing happened as above, I can't keep the window open long enough to do anything. Can someone please help me???!!! Incidentally, I initially wasn't able to access the Symantec website, but reading the posts on this forum, I checked my hosts file and found that my access to a lot of anti-virus sites was blocked. However, I deleted all of these, and still I can't do a virus-check on my system using Norton. I would really, really appreciate any help that's out there. Cheers

You have a virus that redirects the internet connection away from any virus removal sites. Very sneaky little bugger, but you can take the hard drive out, and set it to slave, in a clean computer, and run a spyware and virus scan against it. If you are not sure how to do that, get a friend with a cd-burner to put updated virus definitions from norton. Put the norton CD in, and be sure your system is set to boot from cd, then when it starts the scan, abort it, and use the latest virus definitions, which you copy to a folder on your hard drive, to scan for virus infections. You will need to read the help or docs for Norton, to learn how to specify what virus definitions to use. Hope this helps. Steve

This looks like your problem, you should be able to get to the site after fixing the host file. http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.gaobot.cii.html

If you have AdAware and Spybot already on your system (hopefully with the updated idexes) boot into safe mode and run them from there. Possibly you can also now access your register (START/RUN/type REGEDIT, OK). If you can, navigate to the two RUN hives in the H_key LOCAL MACHINE and CURRENT USER. There you will find one or more startup references to some of your problems. Problem is that sometimes the reference is put back in on next boot, but sometimes not. Reboot back into normal mode. If you can, get to Trend Micro's free online virus scan HERE. If you don't have them, hopefully you can download AdAware and Spybot and run them. That should at least get you started, but I think you are going to have to run HiJack This to pinpoint where the baddies are. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime; Then industry pollutes the water and kills all the fish.