Earlier today, when I tried running Notepad on the system, the Windows Media Center window diaplayed, until yesterday double-clicking notepad displayed the Notepad application. I tried opening “notepad.exe” couple of times but the result was the same. I tried other applications as well, but again, the Windows MCE window just kept popping up.
Wonder what’s wrong, is it a virus, malware, or is somebody using a trojan to stop me from completing my upcoming best seller, “Taking Blind Monkeys for a Shit” Let me do a thorough scan of the system and see what comes up. Will post once I am back.
UPDATE: After spending the last two hours trying to rid the system of theW32/Sality.t parasitic virus, I am back online, in all possible ways.
What this wicked virus does is that it infects all Windows portable executable (the ones that end in “.exe”) on a system, and launches an application other than the one it belongs to. In my case it turned out to be “Windows Media Center Edition” hence the title. Guess I must apologize to the folks at Microsoft for falsely accusing them, but nah forget it, they can’t hear me anyways so why bother.
But then again, you can’t blame me entirely for it. I tried launching every other application on my system, but each time time the Windows MCE window displayed. Microsoft too must share the blame because ultimately it was one of its apps that got infected. Then I got the brainwave that this could be MS’s latest trick to trouble people like me [:)]. The only executables that didn’t get infected were the ones I had running at that time, namely, Firefox, FlashGet, AVG Anti-Virus etc.
This is where I made my second mistaker. I decided to reboot the system before running a virus scan. After rebooting, even these applications stopped working, so running a virus scan was no longer an option. Ultimately, I was left with one of two choices, either I could plug my hard drive into another system and run a scan, or I could format the drive and reinstall everything. Yes, I lost all my data as well because the virus would not allow me to burn a DVD. Most of you would have chosen the first one. But I guess I’m too lazy to go looking into people’s systems. I decided to reinstall everything even at the cost of losing all my data, which included six movies, and my master piece I had written to educate people who have pet monkeys.
Now everything is up and running and I am protected in more ways than one. Unfortunately, the world will have to wait a few more months so that I may be able to re-wtrite my book. Hope they don’t go on a rampage on hearing about this.