Saturday, March 5th, 2005

I spent two hours today working on two computers simultaniously. One was running Win98 and the other XP. They were situated in a beautiful home and owned by a family of four. Can you guess what the problem was? You probably guessed correctly - spyware. The XP machine was sporatically having trouble connecting to the Internet and was running slower than normal. The Win98 machine was spitting out blue screens on occasion and also running slowly. I decided that I would begin working on the Win98 machine first since it was my least favorite of the two to troubleshoot.

Each computer already had the necessary tools installed; Zone Alarm Pro, Norton Anti-virus (updated too!), AdAware, Spybot and the XP machine even had HiJackThis installed. My first step on the Win98 machine was to run msconfig to take a peek at the startup menu. Right away I noticed a few problems and disabled them. Then I rebooted into Safe Mode and ran AdAware and Spybot which removed over 300 problems. Then I ran Norton and no viruses were found. Next I rebooted and ran msconfig again and found winstat.exe running. I did a quick search on www.processlibrary.com and found "winstat.exe is a process that belongs to the Kodorjan Trojan. Kodorjan Trojan is a backdoor worm that steal personal data" - Norton didn't pick this up so I manually removed it.

While working on the Win98 machine I was performing the same routines on the XP machine. AdAware turned up a mere 15 critical objects and Spybot found 1 or 2. I installed Microsoft Anti-Spy Beta and ran it which resulted in located and removing another 20 infections. My experience with Microsoft Anti-Spy thus far has been more than positive! The main culpret on this machine was WildTangent (cdaEngine0400.dll) but was no match for Microsoft Anti-spy.

Upon leaving I explained to the family that downloading free software sometimes gives you more than you expect. Then I told them about Google and that if they want to download something that is free to perform a Google search first and see if anyone else had problems with the application. I left a stack of business cards on the desk and asked them to pass them around to friends and co-workers. They seemed quite happy with the work so I should see some "word-of-mouth" business in the next few weeks.

Tomorrow I have an appointment set up for a late afternoon. The problem is that the computer (XP - Home Edition) won't boot. According to the kid I spoke with (his mom called first but she doesn't know anything about computers so she put her son on the phone) his computer gets to the login screen and freezes. He said that he downloaded something and tried to uninstall and ended up with a machine that will not boot! I am thinking that I might have to run chkdsk from the recovery console but first I will see if I can get in using Safe Mode. Who knows, I have to see it to diagnose it! In addition to this I should complete the first draft of the video conversion I have been working on for a week. I would like to hand a copy of the first version to my client on Monday.