I Need Help WIth a VIRUS and *SHELLEX.EXE* file

[WeekendWarrior]

Hi all I am getting annoyed here. I just had a hdd crash last weekend so I got a new 40 gig Maxtor.
I was reinstalling everything and system is still fairly clean.
I was running a test on the cd drive speeds in easy cd creator when my norton anti virus pops up and said that WINDOWS\SYSTEM SHellex.exe is infected with the Trojan back door virus unable to repair it.
SO it was quaranteened , and I sort of panicked and deleted the file.
It also showed on Nortons log that it found the JS Exception Exploit virus in temporary internet files.
So I deleted the folder temp internet files.
Virus checker is up to date and now when I run a full scan doing ALL files no viruses are found/
Am I safe?
DOes anyone know what the file shellex.exe is for or does? Should I try to replace it somehow?
COuld Norton have made an error while the cd speed test was extracting files?
I am not sure how I got a virus...definately not from email as I only had a few text emails at the time.
system is only 5 days old.
I want to back up or ghost the drive but not sure if I should now.
any ideas?
thanks
WW

 

[WeekendWarrior]

I went to Housecall.com and did a scan from there and it was ok no viruses found.
anybody have info on that file?
thanks
WW

 

[Saltin]

I'm pretty sure that SHellex.exe is not a Windows system file.
I ran a search for it on Symantec's site and found nothing.
If you are at all worried, I would suggest a re-format. It's the only way to be completely sure.

EDIT: Ok I ran a google search on the file and it is legitimate. It seems to play a role in Java Scripting somehow ( Im not a scripter, so maybe someone could elaborate for us).
It also appears that this file is prone to backdoor trojans. Some appear to be written specially just to exploit it. That's all I was able to glean.

 

[WeekendWarrior]

Thanks for the info. I cant find much on it either.

 

[kmmatney]

This a little unrelated, but may help someone else.

I recently had a virus infect my system. I was stupid and turned Norton off while playinga few games, and then I downloaded some crud from the internet. The virus quickly infected 400 files on my system, including Norton. My Anti-virus software wouldn't run, and so windows stopped working (Win 2K).

I then found a freeware DOS anti-virus program call F-prot. It was small enough to fit on a floppy, and I was able to boot from Win98 startup disk. F-prot was able to actually "clean" the virus from all but 3 files. Luckily, my operating system partition is formatted with Fat32. When I finally reloaded Norton, it could not clean up the remaining 3 files either, so I know that F-prot did a great job.

If it wasn't for this DOS program, I would have had to reformat, re-install everything.