Well I ran into a real "stumper" this week! My wife volunteered me to repair one of her co-workers computer (hey I don't mind, I really love this stuff) but wouldn't you know it, this thing stumped me!

Here's the scenario: This computer is about 6 months old and has windows XP PRO, P4 2.8, and they keep their Norton up to date.
They didn't have a firewall or any spyware programs to speak of.

The owner started getting "popups" that got progressively worse. When the machine was booted up, within 60 seconds or so Internet Explorer would open and some exstremely graffic GAY PORN would be on the machine. It would close if you X'ed it, but would reopen again until it was X'ed one more time. After that it would stay closed but would start all over again after a reboot. After you got past that scenario then came all the popups (none obscene).....I even got one from someone trying to sell Antivirus while visiting Nortons web page!

I Installed Spybot, Ad aware, Regcleaner, and HJT. I ran everthing in safe mode, deleted all files I could find, cleared out the "start" registry,as well as any other registry entry pertaining to the unwanted crap! I uninstalled programs that appeared to have an uninstaller and so on!
After all that I would restart the computer and within 5 minutes it would all come back (when hooked to the internet). When I would look under processes the machine would appear to be at a normal idle of 0-1%.
My only apparent clue was the fact that one of the little activity icons would stay lite constantly (internet activity). I tried using the "System configuration utility" to help. This would solve the problem but only until I went back to a "normal" start up.

After spending several hours trying to resolve this and then realizing that there was less than a Gig of data on the Harddrive, I gave in and reformatted! I transfered all data on to another machine and lost nothing but a little pride!

I could really use some insight into what just happened here. One further thing that really puzzled me was "the things" ability to reload the computer (folders and all) with several different things all at once (such as 180 solutions,1 ST bar.slotch, DyFuca, Power scan, msbb, awoa, gheuai, tpzza, optimize...etc! All this in literally seconds! What I would spend a half hour or so to remove would come back almost instantly.

It's not nice when you really want to take a baseball bat to someone elses computer.........Probably wouldn't be easy to splain! LOL!