Hi

Im pretty certain that something has infected my PC.


The glaring symptoms it has are:
Extremely slowed down download speeds both in terms of dowloading files and browsing websites.
This goes goes for both Mozilla Firefox and IE. However firefox has an extra symptom; it keeps freezing at regular intervals with a high frequency - I've tried reinstalling firefox but it doesnt help.


Thank you very much for listening

Sincerely,
Martin

Hya Martin.

I would uninstall Logitech Desktop Messenger in add/remove programs , and these can be fixed with hjt:

But i dont see any real problems in there.

Give Ewido a go , if you click on the "Prework" link below in my sig , then you'll find a download link and instructions there.

When done , please post the log from it.

Hi Joe

Thank you very much for replying this soon.:grin:

Ewido has found a couple of things. One of them is Winhound which it failed to clean, but Winhound is insanely resistant to everything (including ewido it seems) and has been on my PC for a long time and has never caused connection speed problems.

The symptoms are still there though, Firefox still freezes every 10 secs or so for about 4secs and my download speed is just as slow as it was before.

There is definitely something wrong because I?ve just run an online speed test that I?ve used before and normally it returns download/upload as 80Kbytes/38Kbytes, now however it returns 6Kbytes/38Kbytes... So my upload speed is normal but download speed has dropped severely.

Im thinking that maybe there are two forces involved in this.

• Some kind of malware that is messing up firefox.
• Maybe my slow download speed is caused by my provider having capped it, even though I shouldn?t have a download limit. Not even sure if capping of download speed is what providers do if you exceed a given download limit - wouldn't they just kill the connection if one had exceeded a download limit?.

Is it possible for malware/viruses to actually just limit ones download speed while leaving upload intact? I know this download problem isnt only connected to browser-connected downloading because I also have serious lag when playing an online game like world of warcraft.

Hi again hehe,

I've forgotten to mention that my PC also lags quite a lot while running tasks not related to the internet.

Thanks for the translation.

Strange that the Winhound doesn't show in the hjt log , normally it should.

Ok , lets kill a dog:

Download Smitrem to your desktop:
http://noahdfear.geekstogo.com/click...click.php?id=1

Run the installer and then press Start to Extract the
files to the desktop, Do not run it yet.
Reboot into safe mode (Reboot and keep tapping F8 , then
choose safe mode from the list)

Run SmitRem:

Open the SmitRem folder and double click the "RunThis.bat" file to start the tool. Follow the prompts on screen , wait for the tool to complete , and disk cleanup to finish.

The tool will create a log named smitfiles.txt on the drive that you ran Smitrem on, eg; "C:smitfiles.txt" , or the partition where your operating system is installed on.
Please attach this log to your next reply.



You will need to reload your wallpaper as the SmitRem
tool will reset it, you can do this by right clicking
desktop and choosing properties, First check Theme and
set it to Windows XP then click the Desktop tab and
choose the one you want to use and press apply.




And have a look with this app to see if there is anything using bandwidth on youre pc:

http://www.netlimiter.com/download.php

But it sounds like an ISP prob i think , have you contacted youre ISP about this?



Is there anything that is using an abnormal amount of cpu cycles? Have a look in youre taskmanager.

Can't say anything about the PC lag in general yet but the download speed looks like some sort of cap put in place. 6KB is awful close to 56kb (7KB). Call your ISP and see if they've capped your high speed to a low speed. This in this case should reset at the months end.

Hi Joe and a_ron :smile:

Winhound seems to have been defeated at last, I think we killed a dog! :hello2:


So now the situation is this:
First the good
1. The slow download speed was indeed an ISP problem and has been fixed via purchase of a couple more gigs. hehe
2. Winhound seems to be gone.
And the bad
1. Firefox still does the freezing thing. To give you a better idea of how it freezes: If im typing and it freezes I can keep typing and when the freeze is over it will have registered what i typed.
2. There's constantly an "Active systemprocess" taking up 99% CPU when I look in the task manager. This one has to be the biggest remaining problem as it keeps the system in a constant state of frequent lagging. I dont think the firefox problem is directly related to this as IE doesn't do the same freezing thing.


Really appreciate your help guys