Help me Kill this Virus

[oatmeal fetish....]

As I mentioned in asshat, I got a pretty nasty Virus on my computer. I clicked a link in SA (which no one else seemed to have a problem with) and a bunch of popups came up and my computer restarted. When it came back online it had downloaded the dubious looking "antivirusXP 9000" which would clear away all of my problems for only my credit card number and a 45 dollar charge!

I tried to delete that but I couldn't, and after a few minutes I got kicked off GAIM and it said that the pathway could not be found. I tried going on firefox but windows could not find it. Same with IE. If I search my C drive for these things nothing is found. Same with Winamp, VLC, and a bunch of other programs.

I installed a copy of AVG and ran it in safe mode - I'm not sure if it did anything because it scanned my entire computer in a DOS command prompt looking window in which it called the aforementioned antivirusXP 9000 a Trojan. Below that was a line saying that it was moved to "the Virus vault" the reason I say that I'm not sure if the run did anything or not was that after it was done the window just closed with saying anything else, and brought me back to the AVG screen where my only two options are "run scan" (which I had just done) and "close."

I restarted my computer not in safe mode and the shortcut to antivirusXP 9000 was still on my desktop, but now I was able to delete it, which I did. A search of my C drive reveals nothing about it anymore. However, all the files that had gone missing are still gone. There is a little option for GAIM in my toolbar but when I click it I get the same message about the pathway not being found a bunch of gobbilty gook. IE and firefox are still not around.

My plan now is just to download the firefox installer on my parents computer (the one I am posting this from) and burning it to a cd which I will then run on my computer upstairs, and then just get to redownloading everything. Does this sound like a good plan? Is there anything else I should be doing?

[oatmeal fetish....]

Hrm apparently it also killed microsoft office 

[Larry Flyntz]

My new answer to everything virus-related is to do a factory restore.  It's easy, and if you have a means of backing your stuff up, it's relatively painless (having to reinstall all of your programs, of course, is a big drawback).

But, I'd see if any of the people who actually know what they're talking about have any better solutions.

[TemporalRift]

A factory restore might be your only option, cause a quick Google didn't find any targeted repair methods for that paticular trojan. I'm guessing it moved all your programs and documents somewhere, probably intending to hold them hostage until you give the nice people in the masks the money they asked for, which is a interesting new trend in malware.

You can try just using the Windows search function to find everything, making sure to check the Search Hidden Files and Folders option, but there's a decent chance that your malevolent buddies have things sealed up tighter than that. Anything else would require a degree of repair-fu that is beyond me outside the Ballmer Peak