The computers here in my agency’s interpreter lounge are used by a lot of different people, most of whom download crap onto them. Therefore, there is a lot of malware on these machines. There’s only one guy who’s responsible for maintaining all the computers in the office, so he doesn’t have time to mess with our machines as they’re not typically mission-critical. I only get into the office a few times a month, but when I’m here I’m often asked to try fixing these two machines.

I spent the past two and a half hours attempting to clean this one machine of a virus and adware and all kinds of things. I downloaded Ad-Aware and quarantined 180 items, but the message about a virus - located in C:\WINNT\system32\egedg.dll - kept popping up. Norton said access to the file was denied, so it couldn’t do anything about it. The problem has been going on for months and it’s been driving me crazy; the main terp logon has full administrative rights and I still couldn’t figure it out.

After much fighting and kicking and screaming (and consulting with friends via IM on my Sidekick), I managed to boot into safe mode with the command prompt and I was at least able to rename the file there. I was even able to move it to the root C:\ but I still couldn’t delete the damn thing. I removed all attributes and still nothing. I finally threw up my hands (it wasn’t my dog anyway) and decided to just boot Windows normally and surf the web. So now there is a file called C:\harmful.foo on this machine; I hope nobody touches it.

But y’know what? I haven’t had the message pop up since. Did I fix it? I don’t know. Will people screw up this machine again? Undoubtedly. But for now, it’s okay and I’m okay.