Unable to type anything in MS Office programs

[duragezic]

So my friend's mom's computer is unable to type anything while in Netscape or things like word, so being the nice computer guy I am I go and take a look at it.

Yep, if I load Netscape or ANY MS Office program, I can't type anything anywhere. Its like theres no response from the keyboard yet every other program we tried worked fine like Notepad, IE, Avant. So I uninstall both Nutscape and Office XP and tell her who cares about netscape anyway,use Avant or Firefox. Then I reinstalled Office XP but the problem still persists. They have AVG which runs automatically daily and I ran the Trend Micro online scan and it found 1 file infected with a trojan it appeared, so I just clicked delete. Problem still persists.

I just have no clue what it could be? seems like a trojan/virus, but is there a special scanner/cleaner I can download to look specifically for this? She said that Norton didn't pick up on anything and AVG rarely does. I would've thought it'd be just another family computer that is completely owned by spyware/adware, but much to my suprise their machine wasn't too bad, just a lot of junk installed, but they did have Spybot, Adaware, and SpywareBlaster. :Q

 

[OneClone]

try www.pandasoftware.com online scanner. Panda is better then all in my opinion.

left side of page is the animated gif, click on it. Give email to get reply of diagnostik.

i hope this helps.

/CLONE

 

[boshuter]

I had a similar problem a while back with strange typing problems in Office. The one I worked on would either not enter the text you typed at all, or it would come up with all kinds of odd characters. The solution I found was to disable the advanced text services. Might be worth a try.

 

[mechBgon]

The first link in my signature has some security-related stuffs you might want to check out. Run the system through Office Update, get its Windows updated and set up Automatic Updates, turn off System Restore and delete the SR files, and there's a link there to the Panda and Symantec online antivirus scans. The Symantec link also can do a port scan to see if the system's visible from the Internet. If it is, figure out a firewall for them, software or hardware.

Bottom line, something bad got in, and that means there's a vulnerability somewhere. Find it, fix it, educate the user about it Do you happen to remember what trojan it was, by the way?

 

[duragezic]

I'm pretty sure I turned off Adv Text Services when I first got on it, just cause I seen that damn toolbar and I knew they don't use it anyway.

What surprises me is that they do have the good 3 spyware programs, Sygate Personal Firewall, and AVG (they used to have Norton), so it's not like their system is completely open. They could've had this problem long ago tho maybe and have since installed all those utilities.

Anyway, all I got when I go back there is two website addresses to do the scans. I wish I had some other ideas so I ain't going over there for nothing just to run those and be like "I dont know what's wrong." I'll do the updates too but that seems more like a prevention thing for future hacks.

The name of it escapes me, but it was something like TROJA.B. The file found was some 0020-xxx file in the windows\system32\ dir. It was unabled to clean it so I just clicked delete, but again even after that then reinstalling office and restarting the problem is still there.

 

[duragezic]

BUMP