Recent Blaster Victim

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Hey, anyone out there! I am a first-timer here, so bear with me. Here's the story. I have a Dell Dimension 8100 with Win2000 Server installed; 256 RAM, 60gb drive, no partitions, Office 2000 Developer, Visual Studio 6, IE 5.5, and some other extemparaneous stuff. I just recently had cable internet installed, and no sooner did I connect up with it than my machine was viciously attacked by both the Blaster and Nachi worms. My McAffee Online Virus Scan proved inadequate to the task of eliminating the worm; Nachi kept popping up in svchost and dllhost files, as I have read it does, and causing the actual svchost to crash, disabling several IE functions. A techie friend introduced me to the AVG virus scanner, which was able to remove both Blaster and Nachi, and to SpyBot, which was able to remove almost 200 spyware programs (I made sure they were adware/spyware first). However, I seem to have quite a few significant problems, most likely registry-related, remaining. They are as follows:

I.E:
Certain hyperlinks won't work, esp. those without www prefixes. This has kept me from being able to download the Blaster patches.
My Discover Card site told me that Javascript and Cookies aren't enabled; I checked, and they are.
I cannot print any web pages.
I cannot save any web pages.
some command buttons won't work.
in Help/About Internet Explorer, the Version, Cipher Strenth and Product ID are all blank.
I cannot access any of the Microsoft pages where patches are available.

OFFICE:
Word gives me the error "this document could not be registered" when opened.
I can't do copy and paste in Word.
Printer takes a long time to process a word document job.
Excel gives me "can't use object linking and embedding", "An error occured while initializing the VBA Libraries", then it crashes.
In Access, the error "A problem occured while Microsoft Access was communicating with the OLE Server or Active X control" pops up every time I mouse over the Objects section of the database window.
Front Page simply crashes.
Powerpoint and Project are OK.

VS6:
Visual Basic 6 simply says "unexpected error" and fails to open.
Visual InterDev tells me "The vcm Package Package failed to load" if I open it empty. If I open an existing project, it crashes.

WINDOWS IN GENERAL:
Windows Explorer doesn't display correctly in folders customized for Image Preview.
Windows Imaging won't open files; it says that they are "already in use by another application".
Windows Update will not function (neither will the hyperlink to it on any site). This has also kept me from obtaining the needed patch for Blaster.
Add/Remove Programs will not display anything; only a blank window with one line of text at the top.

That's the whole exhaustive story. I probably have to reinstall Office 2000; I hope I don't have to reinstall Win2000 Server, and that there are maybe some simple registry tweaks that can be done. This is really obnoxious. Please Help!
 
Hi,
I've your same problem on IE6 (opening the about box doesn't show the information). I've win2000 Server with SP4.
Have you find any solution?

thanks
 
I think you're going to have to reinstall your Win2k. At the very least I'd try a reinstall of IE 6 & MS Office. If those don't clear up your problems then you'll have to go the whole hog.

I find it interesting that McAfee didn't catch the worms that attacked your PC but AVG found them easily. I've been using AVG Free version for years now since I stumbled upon a recommendation for it in this site many moons ago whilst looking for ways to tweak my GeForce 1 (ah the days of 3DSpotlight) and I'd be hard pressed to find any faults with its anti-virus capabilities.
I built a spare machine a while back & had finished installing Win98SE & all relevant drivers on it but hadn't had time to install AVG before my mum started using it & ended up getting it infected with 2 different virii which made me have to reinstall the whole OS all over again. Moral of the story: AVG is your best friend.
 
I know it's a drag but I would start from scratch .Bite the bullit backup your Data..Do a nice clean install .Everything.Get all your updates .You will do this faster than you will trying to fix all of those unrelated problems .
Tell yourself what I always do when I've been in similar circumstaances "It could be worse"
 
I dont suppose it is related to installation of w2k SP4??

I noticed Raistlin mentioned SP4. Did you install SP4 around the same time.

I have a w2k box and it just started to give all the same errors you describe, but it never had a virus. I also use AVGfree, and i updated the virus database and scanned yesterday.

Interestingly i also use Spybot. However I use the same set up (AVG, Spybot, Zone Alarm etc) on several XP boxes, and another w2k machine (running SP2), none of which have any of the problems you describe.

I am not game to run SP4 on the other w2k box due, in case it is responsible for these bugs.

As it appears you have no solution at this stage, i will attempt to un-install SP4 and see if the problems go away.

Will post results here.

Jason
 
SP4 has been working fine for me. I upgraded a machine from SP3 to SP4 ( fine ), installed 2K straight with SP4 streamlined ( fine ) & 2K server got updated from SP3 to SP4 ( fine ).

I started getting a lot of explorer crashes on the first machine & that was after doing a Windows update where I installed 5 updates in one go instead of installing them each one by one.

While installing SP4 did you ask it to do a backup in case you wanted to un-install ?
 
I made the mistake of NOT doing the backup during a Service Pack install once, and I will never make that mistake again...:(
 
I run W2K Pro/SP4 and it has been rock-solid all the way.
Should there be any problems, I can always fall back on my saved Drive Image backups.
 
Your comments give me some confidence. I will install sp4 on the other w2k box, and make sure i select to do the backup.

I dont think i did the backup for the box with the problems, but i cant uninstall sp4 anyway because when i select "Add Remove Programs" the whole window is just blank!

I still cant see that a virus could be responsible for such a wide set of problems. Only Microsoft can be that efficient ;-) Besides, once its removed, why do the problems remain? Do i really need to re-install windows, office + every other software (the scanners software is broke too)? None of these issues were there two weeks ago.

Right now i am re-installing sp4 in the hope that some installation error may be responsible (i administer this pc from remote, so anything could have happened while i wasn't looking)

If none of this works, i guess i'm spending next weekend formatting the drive and re-installing the whole system. (not that thats a bad thing for a 4 year old Windows machine i suppose)

Thanks for your comments.

Jason
 
Your not going to believe this (I don't). It worked.

I re-installed SP4 and everything works fine.

Add Remove programs is fully functional
Word opens with no errors and links to other files
Cut and Paste works again in Word
Email attachments are opening fine from Outlook
Calendar entry's are opening fine from Outlook
Scanner works fine

I stand by my previous comment regarding Microsoft :)

Fingers crossed i'm not back here next week (and yes it is 3:40am).

Thanks again

Jason
 
The virus prevention files should be saved on a disk before you rebuild the computer so thatway before you connect to the internet you can have Norton and these files already on your computer to prevent more of this crap, sorry it happened, a clean sweep fixes most problems ;)
 
just FYI, use Lavasofts Adaware instead of spybot, you will find and remove alot more stuff then spybot can. and make sure there are no files with the avb extension adn wierd names on your pc. these files will regenerate some of the files you remove.
 
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