new virus? help! my system is falling apart

[nikko]

I got home yesterday to find my computer acting strangely. It seems to have been in the middle of a defrag operation (using O&O Defrag) when it froze up. I had to hold down the power button to turn it off. After multiple loooooooooooooong attempts at rebooting, it finally booted up, but my system is all screwy.

The first thing I noticed is that the password sign-on screen had reverted to classic mode (i.e. I now had to type in my user name and my password, whereas before I just had to put in my password). Not a big deal, but kind of strange since I hadn't changed it. More troubling is that the system is extremely slow to respond and certain things don't work at all. Specifically, I can't get task manager to come up. I tried every way I know to bring it up and it just won't work. I also tried to bring up system restore and that won't work. Ditto with Help & Support.

Also weird is that my torrents directory is missing some files. Only file names that start with an A through G are there. Everything else is missing.

Is there some new virus that I should be aware of that would have done all this? I'm running XP SP2 with a firewall turned on. I have the latest version of Anti-Vir Guard installed. I did a scan but it came back clear.

Any ideas on what might have happened to my system? More importantly, any ideas on how to fix it? Or is a reinstall my only option?

 

[Malak]

If your password had failed I would have said you were on someone else's computer lol

Are you the only one that uses this computer?

 

[ColKurtz]

After being an AVG proponent for a year or so, one of my systems recently got hit with a few Trojans that AVG didn't notice. I picked up McAfee and though it did pick up and quarantine 2 or 3 files, the trojans would always end up popping back up (this was XP and I had system restore disabled) after a day or so. I eventually fixed it by running HijackThis. The downside of HijackThis is that it uses a completely heursitic approach, so it just pops up a list and it's ultimately up to you what to delete. Although I thought I was very careful in what I deleted (only those things I recogzined or researched), and it did fix my problem, something I did now prevents me from getting remote desktop access to my machine.

So if you are able, boot to safe mode and run some other antivirus, run anti-spyware, and if all else fails run HijackThis and run the results through the HJT auto analyzer.

Good luck.

 

[robtk3]

I suppose it's possible that whatever files RAM was holding/defragmenting would have been lost forever when you cut the power. If you have up to date anti-virus software, I don't think that is your problem. Do you have a recent backup?

 

[nikko]

Thanks for the replies. I have a backup that's probably a month old. Hopefully I can get my machine to function long enough to back up the rest of it. Anyway, if anyone else can make sense of what's going on, I'm open to other suggestions.

 

[robtk3]

A month old backup isn't so bad. I just recovered my C: using a four month old image.

 

[MrChad]

Can you run chkdsk? You may be having hard drive failure.