3 replies to this topic

[Morrigan]

So I thought this was cool, in that "I hope it never happens to me" sort of way. This happened to my brother and it was confusing and I'm glad I wasn't asked to troubleshoot it (although I would have done it in a heartbeat).

So onto the story!

Yesterday my brother's computer started to go wonky. None and I mean NONE of the executables were working. You try and open the virus scan, a game, IE, System Restore... practically anything really, and it doesn't work. It says it's unable to open it. My other brother is trying to figure it out and starts surfing the net to find solutions and I guess he finds one or my other brother did, doesn't matter who, but eventually they find a solution.

The solution ended up being that they had to download a program that re-associated the registry with the executables. Whatever it was, whatever virus/program/spyware that did this unassociated executables in the registry and made everything stop working. I don't know if they got rid of the virus or not but I thought that it was epic enough to share the crazy terribleness of it.

[AndyF]

Seen something like this before a few years ago on a friends machine (it was Win 98 at that time), virus alters .exe and .com file associations in registry to not 'open' with explorer / command as normal, only itself or nothing. Typically will disable regedit and command line too, was most annoying.

Not a massive problem these days on more modern OS's unless remote registry and networking is disabled (as you can manually 'fix' it if you can connect to it) although that is a pain. Easy first step is to whip hard drive out and connect it to another machine as a secondary drive and then use the usual anti-virus / anti malware scans on it to remove as much as possible.

[Morrigan]

Yeah. I think that's what they did last night. I know they got it at least functioning. Whether or not they removed it is another problem. It is annoying though, completely agreed.

I don't know how it came up, I think that it was just one of those things that you "remember" at odd times. But we were reminiscing on some stuff we saw in college and we started talking about the DOS Mr Clean Program that my school used to use. >_< All it did was wipe a harddrive on boot. Talk about full of suck if you didn't want your drive wiped. >_<

"So fresh and so clean, clean!" *laughs to herself.

[AndyF]

I don't know how it came up, I think that it was just one of those things that you "remember" at odd times. But we were reminiscing on some stuff we saw in college and we started talking about the DOS Mr Clean Program that my school used to use. >_< All it did was wipe a harddrive on boot. Talk about full of suck if you didn't want your drive wiped. >_<

Andy remembers things like Amiga discs that had boot block virus's on them. Was not a huge problem really (most decent ones had a 'quick virus scan' on boot that checked it was clean) , as long as you did not write data to the disk (power off would kill said virus) unless you were lucky enough to have a hard drive on your Amiga, then it would install itself to there.

I think the same used to be a problem with very elderly PC's too (before hard drives were common)