Tonight my computer detected a trojan/virus that seemed to do a couple of weird things to my computer including turning off my firewall and disabling my system restore function. Whenever my computer had a trojan/virus before, I would just do a system restore and everything would be OK, but tonight everytime I tried, it told me that it couldn't do it because no changes had taken place since that restore point or something to that effect.
After rebooting, Avast did a complete scan, deleting a number of trojan files, including some in the system restore program. When ther first trojan files were found it asked me what I wanted to do with them and I selected "delete." After that, it automatically deleted any trojan files it found. The scanning seemed like it was going to take a while so I left the computer and went off and did something else. When I came back, the Avast program had exited automatically so I assumed that it was finished. There was some type of log in the Avast program folder but I couldn't really make much sense out of it.
Also, now that the trojan files have been removed, should I try to do a system restore to make sure that it's working properly or should I just leave everything alone since my computer seems to be back to normal?
System Restore just puts the computer back to a system status before the attack. It does not remove virus or anything to that effect. I would suggest running the Avast boot time scan once again, but first turn off system restore. After Avast has finished, and hopefully it will not find anything then reset the system restore to the current state of the PC. Remember that system restore does not remove registry entries that a virus may make.
I would also run a couple of other programs to make sure that the system is clean. CCleaner to clean the registry, Spybot Search & Destroy, and A-Squared Free 4. You can find them all by using google!
Keep your system clean. I recommend a weekly cleaning with Avast, Spybot, CCleaner, and A-Squared. All the programs are free and will keep your system clean.
