Jerry's latest Virus and Spyware removal Checklist

Here are some steps I use to remove viruses and spyware. I take no responsibility for what happens if you use these steps, but they have been pretty successful for me. These steps are similar to what Steve Cherubino from the http://www.podnutzdaily.com/ show uses, with a few different steps. Thanks to Steve for his insight, and check his podcast for PC repair out at Podnutzdaily.com and a weekly Podcast with interviews at http://www.podnutz.com/. Also checkout the podcast at http://www.miketechshow.com/ for an interesting insight into computers for techs and not.

Here are my steps. Please leave comments if you have an improvement.

___ Find out when virus happened. If it was within the last week or so, and you can do a system restore, restore back to before the problem occured to remove the problems from the registry.

___ Boot into safe mode and run Smitfraud fix (the latest version)
a. choose 2 and do a clean
b. choose 2 and clean the registry
c. choose 3 and delete trusted zone

___ Remove all temp files and delete all files in IE settings

___ Run Autoruns utility from Microsoft and see what is in the registry to run. ****WARNING**** YOU ARE MESSING WITH THE REGISTRY BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU REMOVE ****** Delete unwanted registry entries (Hint - entries without a publisher such as Microsoft or Hilgrave may be viruses. Be careful what you remove, Some valid ones without publishers are as follows: Changer, display panning, lbrtfdc, pcidump, several that start with PD*. Note some drivers may not show a publisher but are still valid and these files will show a .sys extension if you look at the end of the line. Most spyware/virus files will look strange... such as "dbrfstexefs.exe" or they may imitate an antivirus program such as "AV2009.exe"

___ Run Hijackthis and look there also. Remove unwanted items there. *** AGAIN WARNING **** YOU ARE MESSING WITH THE REGISTRY, SO BE CAREFUL!!!

___ Run CCleaner and check all boxes. then do a registry cleanup with CCleaner

___ Run Dialafix to fix registry problems

___ After rebooting into regular mode, install and run Superantispyware or Malwarebytes. Both of these programs seem to do a good job. Reboot again when you are through running scans.

___ Reboot and run hijackthis and autoruns again to make sure you see nothing left.

___ If possible, uninstall other AV and install AVG 8.0 and run a scan

___ Clean up and uninstall Superantispyware, CCleaner, malwarebytes, and other used software if necessary.