PC Advisor

Recently a friend brought me a very badly infected computer to repair. The computer after various tests was found infected  by multiple pieces of malware. The very strange thing of the whole scenario was the presence of a file called "sol630.txt" in windows/system32 folder. This file was a masqueraded dll file that:

• Could not be deleted (you could delete it but it kept being recreated)

• Was called everytime an application was launched (found the registry key:[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows]"AppInit_DLLs"="C:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\sol630.txt" which also kept being recreated when deleted)

• And the most strange thing is that we could not find any info about this file in the web! We found info about a similar file called sol629.txt.

Avira’s antivir detected the presence of a trojan and various other malware, but could not remove everything even in safe mode.

The solution to repair the system was sadly the complete removal of the old windows installation and the installation of Windows from scratch.

A blog reader sent us the following question:

After browsing and searching through files in his hard disk drive using windows explorer (mostly image files) he tries to delete a  file and the System displays an error message saying that the file is in use and cannot be deleted. The file is not in use.

This can happen sometimes, when Windows explorer locks a file and then fails to unlock it. The solution is either to reboot the system (Bad one) or do the following:

• Press ctrl+alt+delete and select Task Manager

• Go to the tab Processes

• Select explorer.exe and press the button End Process

• Go to Applications Tab and press the button New Task

• Type explorer and press the enter key

• Now try to delete the file

A blog reader sent us a question about the following problem:

When I type and send an e-mail in outlook express 6.0 (Windows XP SP2), sometimes it reaches the recipients with most of the message body missing.

This is a common problem (known to Microsoft) and it can be solved by downloading this patch.