I recently installed Norton on my computer. Not to my delight, norton found almost 100 infected files... 84 to be excact. Anyways, i removed all 84, but now when i load my computer, there is an error message saying "cannot find system32.exe". I know that this is one of the files that i removed because it was infected. How can i fix this error message at startup? Thanks, Alex brds85@yahoo.com

Same is happening with me, Thanks for any help Mark

Your XP is corrupted. Reinstall OS system32.exe doesn't exists under normal installation

Your amchine can't run without System32. The virus was intended to screw up your machine...which it did. I wrote a web page that describes how to recover from this problem. The important thing to remember when you follow my instructions is that you will be restoring a past version of system32...it may be infected? By folowing my instructions you will at least be able to start your machine and get any important data off of it. http://miscmail.home.mchsi.com/xpfix/xp.htm

I had same problem and this post solved it. read the post and go to the link that Geezer poted in response #1. Your problem will be fixed, but follow instructions to the letter. Registry editing has ot be exact. here is the link. http://www.computing.net/windows2000/wwwboard/forum/46793.html

Thanks guys.... worked perfectly... stupid virus makers... they're all going to hell. and not the cool part, but the gay part... LOL.. anyways... thanks for your help..

When you install software download clients such as Imesh it will install some programs that allow other computers to connect to you so you can share your files. These programs are picked up by Norton antivirus as being a virus (cydoor, sbot) because they provide a backdoor to your computer for other people running imesh for example. I do not know yet is system32.exe is part of imesh required files or just one of those adware/ spyware things it installs with itself to pop up those annoying adds or send info about your useage. System32.exe is not a windows operating system file and therefore doesn't get installed with windows so if you think you need this file and you try to reinstall the opsys you won't get far. You'll still get the same message "system32.exe not found". The only system32 thing that windows uses is the system32 folder which is a folder and not an executable. To remove the system32.exe error message you need to remove its occurances from the registry. Occurs in these places but may be in others: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunServices] I do not know if that executable is actually dangerous at all but norton don't like it and the sytem works without it.