Good News with two Nasty Viruses

This will be the short version of a posting that did not show up.

Before going on vacation, I had MS update my wife's Dell D-600
to XP Pro SP3. All updates were installed and it was working near perfect
so I backed up using Ghost and Acronis (Belt and Suspenders).

Somewhere on the vacation (airports, hotels and friend's houses) the
laptop picked up two or more viruses. The Symantec anti virus started
nagging me about two viruses called:

Joke.Blusod
Trojan.Blusod

In addition something corrupted Internet Explorer 7 and I could no longer
connect to wireless networks. I suspect it was the explorer.exe that
has been mentioned.

The Symantec is good for alerting you and trying to protect but I was
surprised to find it does not remove the viruses. It did provide a long
winded procedure that was way over my skill level. One of the Symantec
blurbs said to go to a box under the IE Tools and I was presented with a
note that this had been disabled by something.

At this point I decided to restore the laptop to the last known good
backup and ran into more trouble when the problem (infection) prevented
the Norton Ghost CD from booting the machine. It flat would not boot
from the CD and opened up XP Pro. After wasting hours with Ghost, the
Acronis worked like a champ and restored the D-600 to like it was before
vacation. It is now working great and I may trash the old Ghost 10 since
it let me down in my hour of need. The Acronis boot CD worked great. I
just used the Acronis Cleaner and it seems to have helped too.

Going to do another backup now that I have Humpty-Dumpty running again.

Thanks for reading this shaggy dog story. I was not having fun!

Hey, I'm glad things are back to normal and clean again,
but let me give you a bit of advice regarding Symantec.
Over the years I suffered with the difficulties of getting
them to help at all, but in the past six months I've found
that they will go out of their way, and spend untold amount
of time, on line with you, to help solve problems just like
yours. You go to their website and find your way down to
tech support, and they encourage you to do free Live Chat
with them. Their tech analysts, as they call them, are so
polite and solicitous that it almost hurts. I used to complain
about them, but not any more!!!

BTW, I tried Acronis True Image, and found that it worked well
and had a nice interface, nicer than GHOST 10, it did funny
things with the assignment of letters to the various partitions,
and I stayed with Symantec's Save & Restore, which is a modernized
version of the GHOST series, and will accept all of its old
drive images.

aRKay wrote:
> This will be the short version of a posting that did not show up.
>
> Before going on vacation, I had MS update my wife's Dell D-600
> to XP Pro SP3. All updates were installed and it was working near perfect
> so I backed up using Ghost and Acronis (Belt and Suspenders).
>
> Somewhere on the vacation (airports, hotels and friend's houses) the
> laptop picked up two or more viruses. The Symantec anti virus started
> nagging me about two viruses called:
>
> Joke.Blusod
> Trojan.Blusod
>
> In addition something corrupted Internet Explorer 7 and I could no longer
> connect to wireless networks. I suspect it was the explorer.exe that
> has been mentioned.
>
> The Symantec is good for alerting you and trying to protect but I was
> surprised to find it does not remove the viruses. It did provide a long
> winded procedure that was way over my skill level. One of the Symantec
> blurbs said to go to a box under the IE Tools and I was presented with a
> note that this had been disabled by something.
>
> At this point I decided to restore the laptop to the last known good
> backup and ran into more trouble when the problem (infection) prevented
> the Norton Ghost CD from booting the machine. It flat would not boot
> from the CD and opened up XP Pro. After wasting hours with Ghost, the
> Acronis worked like a champ and restored the D-600 to like it was before
> vacation. It is now working great and I may trash the old Ghost 10 since
> it let me down in my hour of need. The Acronis boot CD worked great. I
> just used the Acronis Cleaner and it seems to have helped too.
>
> Going to do another backup now that I have Humpty-Dumpty running again.
>
> Thanks for reading this shaggy dog story. I was not having fun!

Thanks for the note. I did not try to interface with Symantec and
probably should have. The program did what it was designed to do,
discovered the viruses and Isolated them. The Symantec command
line instructions were too hard for me to even attempt.


The best solution was to restore and go back to a known good
configuration and Acronis carried the day.

In article <Oz9GLoTBJHA.3888@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl>,
"William B. Lurie" <billurie@nospam.net> wrote:

> Hey, I'm glad things are back to normal and clean again,
> but let me give you a bit of advice regarding Symantec.
> Over the years I suffered with the difficulties of getting
> them to help at all, but in the past six months I've found
> that they will go out of their way, and spend untold amount
> of time, on line with you, to help solve problems just like
> yours. You go to their website and find your way down to
> tech support, and they encourage you to do free Live Chat
> with them. Their tech analysts, as they call them, are so
> polite and solicitous that it almost hurts. I used to complain
> about them, but not any more!!!
>
> BTW, I tried Acronis True Image, and found that it worked well
> and had a nice interface, nicer than GHOST 10, it did funny
> things with the assignment of letters to the various partitions,
> and I stayed with Symantec's Save & Restore, which is a modernized
> version of the GHOST series, and will accept all of its old
> drive images.
>
> aRKay wrote:
> > This will be the short version of a posting that did not show up.
> >
> > Before going on vacation, I had MS update my wife's Dell D-600
> > to XP Pro SP3. All updates were installed and it was working near perfect
> > so I backed up using Ghost and Acronis (Belt and Suspenders).
> >
> > Somewhere on the vacation (airports, hotels and friend's houses) the
> > laptop picked up two or more viruses. The Symantec anti virus started
> > nagging me about two viruses called:
> >
> > Joke.Blusod
> > Trojan.Blusod
> >
> > In addition something corrupted Internet Explorer 7 and I could no longer
> > connect to wireless networks. I suspect it was the explorer.exe that
> > has been mentioned.
> >
> > The Symantec is good for alerting you and trying to protect but I was
> > surprised to find it does not remove the viruses. It did provide a long
> > winded procedure that was way over my skill level. One of the Symantec
> > blurbs said to go to a box under the IE Tools and I was presented with a
> > note that this had been disabled by something.
> >
> > At this point I decided to restore the laptop to the last known good
> > backup and ran into more trouble when the problem (infection) prevented
> > the Norton Ghost CD from booting the machine. It flat would not boot
> > from the CD and opened up XP Pro. After wasting hours with Ghost, the
> > Acronis worked like a champ and restored the D-600 to like it was before
> > vacation. It is now working great and I may trash the old Ghost 10 since
> > it let me down in my hour of need. The Acronis boot CD worked great. I
> > just used the Acronis Cleaner and it seems to have helped too.
> >
> > Going to do another backup now that I have Humpty-Dumpty running again.
> >
> > Thanks for reading this shaggy dog story. I was not having fun!