Sorry I have been gone for a wile.....

[Battou]

A major malware infection as well as seriously limited photography has caused me to be MIA for a wile.

My photo production is still fairly low but....that's all right, I'm back.

[icassell]

Welcome back!!!

[Dori]

Malware, on your computer? Mine just crashed too, total format, new install...
I hope you didn't lose too much

[Terri]

eeek! Hope all is fixed now. Glad to see you back in action!

[Battou]

Welcome back!!!

Thanks

Malware, on your computer? Mine just crashed too, total format, new install...
I hope you didn't lose too much

Well, This little bastard walked right by my active antivirus software and imeadiately disabled my internet connection, Spybot S&D, Malwarebytes and my combofix. I know my way around the hidden parts of the computer system reasonably well and was able to eliminate the core virus exicutable (HOTFIX.exe) and it's associated batch file after the trojan deleted it's body, stopping it from halting my PC completely and redeploying upon system start relitively quickly. It took a bit longer but I managed to locate it's deployment key in the registry, sadly I was unable to find all of the keys, predominately the security disabling ones. Unfortunately it had already injected malicious code into necessary windows files and was disabling my svchost causing constant errors on system start.

I was forced to do a repair instalation in order to get my malware programs to work, something I did not want to do. Windows XP's repair installation is seriously flawed, I had to deactivate my copy of Windows (nullifying my serial number) and resetting the oobe. In the end I did not lose any of my data or software but I need a new legitimate serial number for Windows XP professional SP3.

eeek! Hope all is fixed now. Glad to see you back in action!

Fixed well enough to opperate for now, but in 26 days I could be in trouble.

[Antarctican]

^^^ Most of that was Greek to me, but glad to see you're back!

[Artograph]

Nice to have you back!!!

:O)