A mate was sent the Happy99.exe worm and in turn may of passed it on without knowing. It travels by e-mail and affects the send and receive process on the victim's browser, I have IE5 on win95b and lately IE5 express has been acting up, so I checked "find all files" and Amhappy.wmf 2KB modified 12/9/96- showes up, but the Happy99.exe virus scanner claims the virus or "worm" aint there. So does anybody know if Amhappy wmf is part of something? or maybe another form of the virus? Thanks for any answers

Amhappy.wmf is not an executable file. It's one of the sample cliparts found in the Microsoft Office.

Goto http://www.symantec.com Check the Virus University database there. There may also be suggestions on how to rid yourself of the virus. Symantec will know, if there is a fix.

I've heard of this virus; it supposedly shows a happy face or some such, but in the background it uses a macro to modify your Normal.dot file (in Office 9x/2000) to replicate itself. The easiest way to protect yourself from these kinds of macro viruses is to make your Normal.dot file read-only. To purge the virus, restore your Normal.dot file from your Office setup disks. Somewhere in that same directory is a text file (although it may have some strange extension) with a list of e-mail addresses you have unwittingly sent the virus to. As far as I know, the virus does not have any majorly destructive attributes, although we caught it early enough that we may not have noticed any time-delayed destruction. Hope that helps. Remember the hint, though; most macro viruses out there modify your Normal.dot and replicate through every Office document or e-mail you send. Write-protecting Normal.dot (do you really use custome templates anyway? Thought not) severely cripples the virus's attempts to replicate. You'll know you have a macro virus when you try to save or open a Word document and you get a pop-up window saying "Cannot write to global template." Start looking for recently modified files and delete any that look suspicious.

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