While I was surfing internet, I don’t know where I clicked and it opened up a website which in turn opened a popup window. Within a matter of few seconds, my FireFox browser froze and in the system tray icon, it showed me little nice blue icon with a pop up saying “Your computer is infected with virus. Click here to fix it.”. (Who says Firefox 3.5 is a secure browser?). I killed the Firefox process from Task Manager but I was running as admin of the computer so it created much problem for me as it might have injected lot of spyware/virus. Even Norton Anti-virus could not detect anything while it was running. I immediately disconnected computer from internet so that it won’t affect any other machine and/or send any information from my computer to outside world.
I had Task Manager open so I looked at various process and I found couple of processes with weird names. Luckily I had Process Explorer on my computer so I opened it up and checked out from which location those processes were executed. I first killed those processes and then deleted it. I requested Norton to wake up and clean my computer and so it did but now the drama starts.
When I restarted computer, it showed me a virus but Norton did not detect it. I used Process Explorer to know the location and removed it. I ran registry cleaner along with Norton couple of times to remove all spyware/virus. Finally I cleaned my computer but now internet does not work at all and all my system tray icons were missing. I searched lots of forums but could not find answer but finally I came across a utility called WinSockFix by Option^Explicit Software Solution. Running this program fixed all my problems related to internet connection. Then I came across a forum post to restore system tray icons. This fixed my problem but I had to go to Control Panel > Sounds and Audio Devices > tick “Place volume icon in taskbar” and it restored all my network icons along with volume icon immediately.
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