Hi, my brother has had a nasty attack of spyware, and although I'm normally ok with wiping it, this takes the biscuit. The spyware has 'Tool 1, Tool 2, Tool 3, Tool 4 and Tool 5' in it, these are what I've found anyway, and they create a load of tempfiles in the taskmgr (before it was crippled) in this format: randomnumber.tmp e.g. 34.tmp, 62.tmp, 10.tmp etc. I have googled these, but some of the best fixes require an Internet access to update the files, and I cannot even get to the desktop or start menu or taskmgr to run this. Here is the symptom: Ok, when booting up, his desktop comes up briefly, and then disappears. His wallpaper is left in the background, but nothing else loads, and he gets several error messages a few seconds later. Task manager has been killed, is disabled and when trying to open it, he gets a message to say: "The Task Manager has been disabled by the systems administrator", and none of the other keys respond to any pressing i.e. Win key, Alt + F4 etc, nothing. Putting the CD I've burned for him with the utilities into his PC, the autorun.dll (I think that it...) won't run, and he gets an error refecting this. So, the only way I can get to his desktop is by going there in safe mode, yet I cannot install many programs as most require installation outside of safemode. If anyone knows of any ways I can at least get the desktop back or the task manager then I think I'll be OK from there. I know I can download updates for deffinition files from my PC, and take them over on disk for some of the spyware apps. Any help would be great Thank you for your time, Alex

Alex, For the Task Manager problem use Method 2 at the link below using another computer to download the reg file fix, then transfer the reg file to the problem computer and double click it to run it. Task Manager has been disabled by your administrator Fix Tufenuf

reboot in safe mode, scan with ad-aware/spyware scan, scan with virus scan empty trash, empty temp folders delete temp internet files and content folder/files, manually trash any files scans cant remove,and delete later after reboot, run scandisk and check registry also :)

Thank you both for your comments, much appreciation for the both of you! I'll give this a go tonight and see whats happening... ... ps - Tufenuf, thanks for that link mate, never seen that before but sounds spot on! Thank you both again.... Alex