Trojans do work on XP; many, at that.
I figured FireFox was allready in use by Aphex (I seem to remember her mentioning its use in the past some place.)
If you have SP2 then the windows firewall is just fine. Unless you download and open/install a contaminated file there should be no problems at all. However... if you do happen to download/install a contaminated file, the hardware firewall (like a linksys firewall router, for example) will block the trojan (in most cases) from allowing remote access to your network. As long as you change your hardware firewall password, there should be no problem.
Aphex:
Please make sure you follow the directions in order. Do not proceed unless what you have done in a previous step has worked.
What popus do you have?
Have you run hijackthis! yet and posted your log to here for me to analyze?
Did you install and run the first set of programs in the list I posted?
What are the results?
Did you try doing a Housecall virus scan in safe mode? How about AVG virus scan in safe mode? Ad-Aware or Spybot S&D in safe mode? MSAS?
Please answer these questions.
You may have a hardware failure on the way, but I doubt that. Still, backing up your imprtant stuff to an other hard drive or to DVD's is not a bad approach.
Aphex:
Please make sure you follow the directions in order. Do not proceed unless what you have done in a previous step has worked.
More things you want to do:
Make sure you have 10% free drive space on your drive and run disk defragmenter. You should allways (regretably) leave about 10% of your drive space open for the best performance (according to microsoft.) Defrag will require you to have at least 10% of your drive as free space to defragment properly.
Also, do the following:
Go to:
"Control Panel"
Open:
"System"
Click the tab:
"Remote"
Disable by unchecking the boxes:
"Remote Assistance" (and) "Remote Desktop"
Go to:
"Control Panel"
Open:
"System"
Click on tab:
"Advanced"
Click on button:
"Settings" (under headding "performance")
Click on tab:
"Advanced"
Click on button:
"Change"
Click on your "C" drive:
Click on the option bullet "Custom size":
Enter initial size of:
1024
Enter maximum size of:
2048 (or) 3036
This will allow your computer to use your hard drive for more virtual memory, which will give you a performance increase. YOU MUST have at least your maximum ammount of hard drive space free equal to your Page File space FREE in order to use it in this way. I reccomend you have at least 3.5-4GB of disk space free anyway, though it is not entirely nescessary... 10% usually does just fine, as microsoft said.
When did this popup problem appear?
Did you install any program you no longer have access to (to install again) since the problems started appearing?
If you have not installed a recent program since you achieved this popup/virus problem, then you can do a System Restore. System Restore will restore your system back to a date before the virus/popups started happening and leave your current data files intact. I reccomned backing up anything you care about first, however (just in case!)
You may be able to go to; Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > System Restore. This will allow you to pick a date from before the popup problem happened and restore to that point in time. You will not lose any docuemnt data. Only programs installed since that restore point will be lost (this includes the bad virus/trohjan/popup.) After a successful restore and reboot, go back to system restore and create a new system restore point (this will be your newest and cleanest.)
After you have done the above or completely fixed your sytem in some other fassion... run "Disk Cleanup" from the System Tools menu in the Start menu (same area as system restore) and follow these steps:
Check the top 4 boxes:
Temp download files, Temp Internet Files, recycle bin, temporary files. Checking any of the other boxes can result in system update problems as well as startup issues. Stupid, I know, but it's the way it is... trust me we've busted a few computers by clicking "compress old files."
Next click the "more options" tab:
Click on "clean up" under the "System Restore" area. Click yes.
(this will remove all of your old restore points.)
Press OK at the bottom of the box and let it "disk clean up" itself.
After it finishes, do the following:
Go to:
"Control Panel"
Open:
"System"
Click tab:
"System Restore:
Change the numbers on each drive in there to be between 700MB and 1500MB by clicking on the respective Hard Drive and clicking the button "settings" then moving the slider to 1500MB (I mentioned 700MB, becauseit is the ammount of space I use on my primary drive, which only has small programs like system files and tools on it.)
This sets a side all of the space you really need to set aside for system restore in almost all cases. Otherwise... windows will attempt to use a rediculous ammount of your free space for the system resotre file. That's crap.
Now you should have a nice and fully fuctional machine problem free.
If not... post back again! Chances are you have a failing hard drive, though this is a small chance. (that is... if all of the other problems have been fixed at this point.)
