system restores and viruses

[mrgenius]

i guess i clicked on a bad link or something and now i'm convinced i have a virus or trojan or something. i have windows xp. would a system restore be enough to rid me of this menace?

 

[Plexus]

Probably. But first, I would consider running an anti-virus such as AVG, which happens to be free.

http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_dwnl_free.php

 

[stormbind]

When I first saw the title I thought it the common complaint about System Restore harbouring viruses... in which case, using System Restore re-installs the virus!

Symantec have some information on this. You should disable system restore, restart, run the virus scanner.

System Restore could replace infected system files with clean ones, but it could equally well have backed up infected files. In either event, it cannot replace the original file that released the virus, so can never be considered a replacement for Anti-Virus software.

The next version of Windows will include Microsoft Anti-Virus protection.

 

[crystal]

Originally posted by stormbind
The next version of Windows will include Microsoft Anti-Virus protection.

What?! Are you sure about that? It only means Microsoft will try to put a few Anti-Virus companies out of the business. I hope the EU fines Microsoft even more greatly than because of including Media Player in Windows.

 

[FireBall]

Microsoft Windows/Longhorn Anti-Virus:

Please Wait... Running....

Scanning Files....

Finsihed Scanning Files...

Microsoft Windows/Longhorn Found, delete it? Y/Y