So I've got this virus or something...

[FirstBlood]

So I'm pretty sure I have a virus...

I had Symantec Anti-Virus installed, but all of a sudden yesterday I noticed that the little shield wasn't in my system tray and when i tried to re-open symantec, it would instantly close within about 5 seconds. And also, whenever I opened a browser (be it Firefox or IE) it would take me to a blank page and would display "Done" at the bottom right as if it was done loading... but there was nothing. Occasionally I could get my home page to load, but any further browsing would be refused. Once I restarting though I could browse almost as normal, although a few select sites don't display correctly, and eventually after the PC's been on for an extended period of time, it goes back to the blank page BS.

So I download AVG and scan and it finds about 22 different viruses on my PC and fixed them. I scan again it finds 1 virus and fixes it. I scan again, it finds 0. I think "phew... I'm okay now." But I go to reinstall symantec and it doesn't get past the unpacking of the download. And later today, the internet did the whole blank-page-done thing. I scan this time and it finds 0 viruses.

If anyone has any clue as to what is going on, I could use some help. I also can't seem to open symantec's main website... says the connection was refused... which is strange.

[JMET]

www.grisoft.com
www.free-av.com
www.pandasoftware.com
www.trendmicro.com

www.lavasoft.com
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html

Get to a friends pc and put all those tools "minus the web based AV scanning" on a cd and you should be good.

It also might help to know the virus that was found, and look at www.symantec.com for the virus removal tool for that virus.

If you run AVG, Ad-Aware, Spybot, Firefox, and have a firewall.. then there should be no reason to get a virus or spyware.