I was given a XP desktop and I was told that the browsers were functioning strangely ("page not displayed", slow response) and also that windows would not boot up all the way some times. The screen would just be black and you could still move the cursor around. I went ahead and installed AVG 8.0 and CCleaner. AVG found and removed a couple of things and CCleaner did it's job. Now for the confusing part...


I figure the problem sounds like the browser is hijacked. I planned on running Malwarebytes, Combofix and HiJackThis. Thing is, I copy over the files to the desktop and double click them to start them and NOTHING HAPPENS! All of the other desktop icons open up, even the previously mentioned CCleaner and AVG. It's hard to begin troubleshooting when I can't get these tools to run.

What should I do??

Nevermind. I just decided to wipe it out and start over again clean.

Thanks for letting us know. I'm sorry you didn't get immediate attention - we might have had a way for you to get things working.

Just for future knowledge, if you run into a situation again with anti-malware programs not opening, try copying the exe file and rename the Copy to something like xxx.exe. Gets around some malware.

Anyway, thanks again.