I've been having a major problem over the past few days with a virus called svchosts.exe. It appears to be some kind of virus or trojan horse that runs at startup through the Personalized Settings. I'm not sure what exactly its doing, since my computer has not shown a lot of ill effects, but I have noticed some slowdown and occasional shutdowns which could be to do with this.
The file is supposedly located at this location-
C:/WINDOWS/WINBOOTERR/SVCHOSTS.EXE
I've looked for this directory and it isn't there, even when showing hidden files and folders.
I have tried everything to remove this virus. I did a virus scan with AVG, it detected the virus and moved it to the Virus Vault, but its still running at startup. I tried using Spybot Search and Destroy which also picked it up, I removed it, but its still running. I also tried removing all instances of the file from the registry with regedit, but it is still there.
Can anyone give me any advice to try and get rid of this very persistent virus, before it does any serious damage. If it's any help I'm on Windows XP Service Pack 3.
You should try running a scan with Malwarebytes. You can also click Start-->Run and type msconfig before you reboot to remove any unwanted start up items. You may have to manually remove the rest of the virus.
