System rebooting after Windows XP splash screen

[Nocturnal]

Alright I have a problem. I removed a bunch of spyware from this computer which included Aurora, WinFixer, Surf Side Kick, and many others. What happened was after rebooting into Windows I was prompted to re-activate Windows even though I hadn?t changed out any hardware. I thought this was rather strange. I went ahead and did an overlay of the operating system. Upon doing the overlay I was prompted to activate Windows, so I did. Upon getting into Windows I found out another culprit which was giving me problems, it was a directory within Program Files. I went into safe mode and deleted the directory. After that I restarted Windows and it kept rebooting after the Windows splash screen. The system was running Windows XP Home with SP2 installed. I?m wondering what exactly happened. I?ve searched Google and came across another posting where someone had a similar situation but did not resolve it. He did resolve it but the guy went ahead and formatted the computer which is my very last resort here.

 

[spyordie007]

The general rule of thumb to follow is if your system becomes compromised you need to format and rebuild; it's the only way to ensure that everything is gone (start clean and stay clean).

With that said if you have data on it you havent backed up that you need you might want to go back into safe mode and do a system restore to before you deleted the directory so you can get it running good enough to do a backup of that data.

Besides, trying to clean this stuff can quickly become more work than a rebuild.