My boss's laptop was acting weird and he asked me to look at it... It wouldn't connect to the web and something changed the wallpaper to a notice that the computer was infected with spyware.

When I ran Ad-Aware it was infected with "Cool Web Search" (Oh shyte I thought...) Got the CWS shredder program and got it off easier than I thought... It also had the "Trojan.Adclicker" too... Norton's got that tho...

The bottom line is - it still would not connect to the web. Device Manager had absolutely NO entries... Network Connections had no entries too.

The long story short - something turned off ALL the services... I mean EVERYTHING - from "Alerter" to "Workstation".. The only reason I found this out was because the laptop was behind on Windows Updates and I was trying to install SP2 from CD and it popped up a message that it could not verify the "update.inf" file because the "Cryptographics Services" was turned off.

After going back and changing the services I recognized to "Automatic" it connected and Device Manager and Network Connections was populated.

Anyone heard of this type of thing happening before??? Is there a list somewhere that says what services should be on Automatic and what should be on Manual?