HI I HAVE A HUUGE PROBLEM...WHICH MAY LOOK SMALL FOR SOME OF YOU

whenever I open up REGEDIT it stays on for one second and *poof* it closes right away same goes with the task manager

I hope you guys could give me a solution as soon as possible

THANKS!
KNIXXED

Sounds like you've got a virus.

THANKS FOR THE REPLY!

But ive deep scanned using scanners and adaware checked for trojans...nothing showed up....

*huhuhu*


BUT THANKS ANYWAY

KNIXXED

Boot into safe mode and then try to change your registry (Make sure you back it up). Then you should also be able to get to the system configuration buy typing msconfig in the run prompt. This will show you what is starting on startup, and you can find where this virus is and destroy it. Just look for anything that seems out of place.

Almost sounds like explorer.exe is failing?

If he loses Regedit, and his task bar...

In the past when Explorer.exe failed i lost all open windows, and task bar.


The other option is that you have a virus of some sort, trojan running somewhere that maybe scanners cant find yet?

I'll toss in my vote for virus as well. This is a well known tactic of virii. Disables your ability to open regedit, msconfig, and taskmanager, as well as usually attempting to disable AV software.

My advice is to boot into safe mode as suggested earlier by Poertner, look for any strange looking services, try to disable them from startup, or, after locating the potential culprit service(s) post back and someone can probably help you with specific instructions on removing the particular virus.

**Just because your AV software doesn't find anything doesn't mean the system is clean, this could be something that has come along since you last updated.

Thanks for all the replies!

I HAVE CHECKED THE REGISTRY AND STARTUP CONFIG, AND DELETED A FEW SUSPICIOUS ONES. And I'm pretty sure the one's left are important.

By the way, is there any good trojan scanner that scans all files on the hard drive? The one i have been using was "trojan remover" (the one that scans system, registry, etc.)

If you have any additional help regarding this, I would gladly appreciate it!

THANKS FOR ALL THE REPLIES!

Knixxed

well you can try adaware and spybot. They might turn up something different.

Just be careful what you open and run from emails or p2p networks. The best antivirus is your brain.

The way i found that fixes this problem might sound a bit stupid but it works. Just copy your taskmanager to a different folder and rename it. This tricks the virus and therefore lets you run task manager and kill programs. Anything suspicious dies! I forgot the process name but it was in the system category, not the user one.

You do have a virus, my friend had the exact same one. We tryed everything under the sun (other then what migetno1 said above).

Couldnt get rid of it - Had to format

Nothing picked it up, no spyware scanners, virus scanners, safe mode or not.

Did you try running an online AV scan?

www.trendmicro.com has one which saved me, as Norton couldn't find the virus...

You'll have to install a little package to scan, but it isn't big, and the scan is quite thorough!

migetno1,

your method really worked. However, for the people who are going to try it, make sure you change the name of the taskman in both

C:/Windows

and

C:/Windows/System32


change the name to anything but task manager

i changed it to program killer <- -> for short, prgmkillr
U

Cool, thanks for the updated input. It's always nice to know we are helping people with some older threads.

Welcome to TechSpot

I've found out how it can be fixed on a clients PC i was fixing at work.

After you have renamed your regedit.exe file to whatever you wanted to.
Open it and search regedit for taskmgr.exe.

when it finds something on the registry, look at the above folders and see if it also includes different file names i.e. regedit.exe, procexp.exe etc.

if it does, just delete the key (folder) named regedit.exe, procexp.exe, taskmgr.exe etc.
i just deleted the whole branch as it contained alot of files that were important to help me delete the virus.

hope this helps.