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Originally Posted by The Munster
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Originally Posted by bradclark1
Do those files actually stop you from doing anything? Just install your new AV.
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They might clash with a new anti-virus program and these [virus] files are in the AntiVir Personal Edition folder in Program Files. |
What the problem is, when you turn your system on, a running process is using those files, preventing them from being deleted. So how you would fix that is to find the running process that is in control, which may be a trial and error thing.
Trying to think of a way for you to do this without screwing with your registry (And possibly screwing up everything), and I am thinking msconfig is the easiest way to do that.
Pull up a run box from the start menu and type msconfig in it. It will bring up a window that will show you everything that is run on your system on startup (the last tab over). From there, you can selectively disable software that starts up, then reboot your system and see if the files in question are free to be deleted.
As mentioned above, if a virus has taken over these files, then it may be even difficult to do this since a common tactic of viruses is to run two copies of itself. If one copy sees that the other copy has been stopped, it will start up that copy again. Same goes vice versa. If you need to run an AV scan to check for this, use a free online scanner to avoid having to load a duplicate AV product at the same time -
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ - This way you can have an alternate program check for bugs.
Remember - when selectively disabling programs in msconfig, you can use google to find out what they do. Then again, the easy way to take care of the problem is to disable everything and then delete the files.
One other thing that comes to mind is that the files could be locked by a 'service'. If that is the case, you can pull up the services menu by typing services.msc into a run command box. Remember that Google is again your friend in determining what services do what.
A suspicious service by the way will typically not tell you anything about itself. Those are the first you should check, but remember that all services that you use do not always give you description.
Let me know how the battle goes. At the very least, you will begin to get a deeper understanding of your system.
-S