Heh heh. I'm honoured! :p

[quote=Quib Mask]You give malware too much credit.[/quote]
I know one thing: Although I succesfully removed the only infection in the past by doing pretty much what you have said thus far, I wouldn't want to go through it a second time... Such a nuisance and bother... Well, at least it taught me a lesson (I switched from IE to Firefox :p ).

okay, after 3 1/2 hours at the CIS center, /i'm back, connected and all better, complete with a newly re-formatted hard drive. ugh. but all's well that ends well.

...ish, I lost all of my music

Sugarless smash?

[QUOTE=Quib Mask]Restart in safe mode, clean up the registry (deleting the files isn't even always necessary, what average user is gonna navigate to windows\system and double click some oddly named executable?), unregister BHOs,. On rare occasions I have to rebuild the winsock path or mess with virtual device drivers, if the malware was particularly well crafted and deeply rooted.[/quote]

How do you know you got everything?

[quote=Quib Mask]There are software firewalls that can catch tunneled ports as well, like if malware tries to hijack some common process to send/receive, or if it tries to use a DLL or some windows component to do its dirty work. It's not perfect, I didn't say it was. You seem to have implied that I thought it was.[/quote]

What I wanted to say is, that these personal firewalls often promise that they can protect you against everything and sound the big alarm bell every time someone pings you but leave the happy silent greek in his trojan horse mind his own business. And because the firewall says nothing many people think that nothing can be happening.
IMHO they give the user a false sense of security.

[quote=Quib Mask]P.S. - Yesterday I was called up by a friend to go take a look at their mother's laptop which had stopped connecting to their wireless network. She had accidently bumped a tiny physical switch from ON to OFF; it was the power switch for the built in wireless LAN card.[/QUOTE]

Yeah, it's always astonishing what the relative "who knows computers" is able to achieve with the great powers of his mind.

Jeez, what do you want from me. How do you know I didn't get everything? 5+ years experience of removing malware and I've seen all the tricks in the book. There's only a half dozen ways malware loads itself, so once you've checked the usual spots, it's clean. A couple reboots to make sure no unusual programs are running and you're set. A 30 minute cleaning is way better than a 2 hour format and reinstall; longer if you backed up stuff that has to be restored after the reinstall.

Also, your comments on software firewalls leads me to believe you either haven't used one, have used a very sucky one, or used one that was poorly set up.

I didn't get if this was an insult or whatnot, but I was just providing a humorous anecdote, not proof of ability.

Please get off my back; you're wasting my time and yours.

QM