Vista Anti Virus 2011 Virus, how to remove

[Narnia]

My sister has been having problems with viruses for a while now. The latest is a popup from an "antivirus" program warning her of an infection. The only problem is that I didn't install that program and I know she didn't either. I exited out of it and an icon has appeared at the bottom right hand side of the screen beside the windows clock. Every few seconds, it says "Stealth Intrusion!" and that it has found an "infection detected in the background" and to "eliminate the infection safely, perform a security scan, and deletion now". I did a google search and all the results say "buy this program to remove the virus". How do I fix the problem? Thanks

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Rogueware. Did you try MalwareBytes yet?

 

[civ_king]

If it has a desktop shortcut boot into safe mode go into properties of the icon, paste it into explorer and then delete everything in that folder

 

[Narnia]

PS: I forgot to mention, it has taken control of her computer so that attempting to launch any program will only bring up the virus and have it start running "scans". This includes trying to start web-browsers.

Edit: It appears that I can still launch programs via keyboard shortcuts so ctrl+shift+esc will turns on Windows Task Manager and start+e still starts windows explorer.
And no Civ-king, there isn't a desktop shortcut
And about launching Microsoft Security Essentials (the REAL firewall) via the actual .exe instead of the .lnk file in the start menu, I tried that already, nothing happened (neither the virus nor MSE started, in both normal and safe mode). Haven't tried launching IE or Firefox that way yet but I doubt it would work.

 

[civ_king]

boot in safe mode

 

[dragokatzov]

I work in IT and I have seen this many times before. Heres what I do.
I have a copy of the file called rkill.com. you can find it by googling it. place it on your desktop and then double click it. it kills all unneeded processed in windows without going into safe mode. you may have to continue clicking this for quite a while but you will know its done when you see a log file appear. after that download and run malware bytes and run a scan and that should take care of it
Though come to think of it, you could probably run malware bytes in safemode as well...

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I work in IT and I have seen this many times before. Heres what I do.
I have a copy of the file called rkill.com. you can find it by googling it. place it on your desktop and then double click it. it kills all unneeded processed in windows without going into safe mode. you may have to continue clicking this for quite a while but you will know its done when you see a log file appear. after that download and run malware bytes and run a scan and that should take care of it
Though come to think of it, you could probably run malware bytes in safemode as well...

Well I remember when I had my rogueware back in 2008 (only malware I ever had -- was actually a fake torrent of something I thought was legit) that the rogueware would even come up in safe mode. It was dug in pretty deep and I ended up just reinstalling everything. Wish id known about Malwarebytes back then.

 

[Narnia]

boot in safe mode

Tried that

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Sometimes the best thing to do is backup and reinstall. I may be a bit hasty but this sounds like one of those cases.