Messed up XP notification area - Virus?

[AMG]

Hi all, I have a weird problem.

Yesterday morning I used my laptop and the notification area was fine and looked like this. Last night when I went to use it again it looked like this, a lot of the icons are missing and noticed it was running a little slow.

I thought maybe something got messed up and they got turned off/switched to hidden and went in to unhide them but as the 2nd picture shows the icons don't even show up. I updated my antivirus and antispywares and did a complete scan, but didn't find anything. I tried restarting it a few times and the only thing I noticed is that one time after a restart Norton was automatically turned off.

I don't have any Sony CDs so I don't think its their a virus using their antiprivacy program.

Any ideas?

 

[DonNagual]

I'd do an online scan to check for viruses: http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

 

[AMG]

Hmm, interesting.

Trendmicro didn't find any viruses but did find a SPYW_SOFTOMATE.A. About half way through the Trendmicro scan my Norton did find a V2FOR2a03364 Exploit-ObscuredHtml Trojan

I deleted them but the icons are still missing

 

[patio]

Download Ewido and before you run it go online and grab the updates. Re-boot into Safe Mode and run it. Let it fix/delete everything it finds and doesn't like.
Re-boot to normal mode with your machine disconnected from the web and re-run all your security apps.

patio.

 

[AMG]

I haven't downloaded the above yet, but I did find 2 more trojans. V2AGR3a01936 and V3ESFHa02236. Why didn't these show up before? All there of these were found by my Mcafee while I was doing an online scan... weird.

 

[patio]

Keep in mind there are many forms of malware. That's why you will see references here for different programs; they specialise in different forms of detection.
Anti-virus programs will find some but not all trojans.
Trojan programs won't detect some common viruses unless they are trojan variants.
Spyware programs do very little detecting the above.
Adware programs ditto what is stated above.

So for a good well rounded protected machine you need
A good AV program
AdAware
Spybot
A trojan scanner
An e-mail scanner
And running the online scans from time to time won't hurt either...

patio.