Spent a couple of days trying to clear a rogue program called WiniGuard from a neighbour's computer. I tried two different virus programs, Avira and AVG, neither one would update and WiniGuard alerts keep popping up.
The problem other than updating the antivirus was trying to research on an hijacked browser. Kept getting sent to other web pages.
I finaly did get what I thought was enough data to get rid of it;The program folder, reg entries, and a few extra ones in the System32 folder (baloon.exe and cfrog.exe).
Still, the browser was hijacked and the antivirus (AVG) was un-updated. I downloaded the updates from my computer burned them on a CD and used the option in AVG to update manually from folder.
Updated successful, but scanner didn't seem to be scanning anything. So I restarted in Safe Mode, and ran their scanner there. It removed a few items one being a file called autorun.inf (from another virus program). I did some more research on this other threat, checked for associated files...luckily found none.
Everything seemed to be clean but then every time Internet Explorer started up AVG would complain about an infected file called msqpdxiveoypff.dll with Trojan horse Generic 12.AH1J.
Using Hijackthis I was able to delete this threat but still no updates. A day later I tried again and found some WiniGuard traces had reappeared. Deleted them as before, finally I was able to get enough control of the browser to download Malewarebytes and update it. It SEEMS to have taken care of the rest.
I'm temepted to tell people to FORGET the antivirus and just get a good malware scanner like MALWAREBYTES : http://malwarebytes.org/
AVG is now updating normally. It's usually recommended to format your hard drive and start over from scratch when you get such a serious infection. Formatting and reinstalling Windows from scratch is not an option when you don't have a CD and don't have the finances to buy one, that doesn't include the inconvience of starting over and having to set up everything again.
Just recently had I try and help fix a crashing Firefox problem. The antivirus wouldn't update either. It's AVIRA from : http://www.free-av.com/ and it said something about no valid license, I first decided to try and uninstall Firefox and reinstall it. But a message popped up claiming a file was corrupted and suggested to scan the drive for errors.
(These instruction are for WinXP but Vista should have similar option)
So I went into My Computer, either on your desktop or in the Start Menu. Find your hard-drive listed, usually has a (C:) beside it, then right-click on it and chose Properties.
Then click on the Tools tab, ypu'll see the Error-checking section - just click on Check Now, another small window pops up - check both options to Automatically fix file system errors and Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors. Then press Start - you'll get a message about it will run on the next restart. Restart your computer and it will start scanning your hard-drive.
This guy's hard-drive had a few serious problems that where fixed and the computer rebooted and then chkdisk ran a second time. The computer rebooted after it finished and started up normally. I still had to reinstall the corrupted programs.