Good Morning My machine has become infected with the W32.Desktophijack virus which has attached itself to the wininet.dll file in Windows/System32 I have already seen an interesting series of replies on the same subject here between Sept 22 and Oct 18. Unfortunately, this seems to have fizzled out and there is insufficient information to allow me to solve my problem. I purchased Norton Internet Security 2006 AFTER getting infected (I already had Norton 2002). However, although this again identified the virus and its location, it claimed to be unable to clean the problem as access was denied to the infected file. Norton also advises shutting off the System Restore (done), doing a full scan of all files (cannot do as Norton screen, although operating, appears totally blank and therefore preventing selection of options--I presume this is a feature of the virus) and removing altered text from the Registry (interestingly, none whatsoever of the likely changes suggested by Norton were included in my Registry). As suggested in the earlier correspondence, I have tried to rename wininet.dll to wininet.dl but the system would not permit this complaining that 'access is denied etc etc' as indeed was mentioned already in Reply 17 of the previous series. I am considering deleting this file and replacing from the website mentioned before but am a little hesitant. Can anybody help to reassure me or suggest alternative solutions? Thanks.

Try rebooting in safe mode (press F8 a few times at boot-up) & then re-name or delete the file. If you do a search of your PC you should find a number of instances of this .dll so you shouldn't need to download another copy. "I know that I'm mad, I've always been mad"

Although I only got one reply to my problem posted on Dec 05, it was a good one and it worked! So, thank you Johnr. I will give some details on how I got rid of this virus which may be of use to others. As had already been suggested, I tried to rename the infected file (wininet.dll) to wininet.dl, however this did not work as apparently the virus had prevented access to the file. However, in SAFE mode, as Johnr suggested, I was able to rename it. Furthermore, I could readily copy the wininet.dll from c:\I386 to the c:\windows\system32 folder wherein lay the infected file. Nevertheless, the renamed file could not be deleted giving, once again, the access denied message even in SAFE mode. In addition, no new and clean .dll file resulted as had been suggested in earlier mail. However, some minutes later, a Norton window reported that a virus had been detected in wininet.dl and eliminated. After this, I was able to delete the .dl file with ease. A happy ending!