Windows XP Media Center Edition
HP Pavilion Desktop /  1 GB RAM
Norton Antivirus / Ad-Aware SE Personal / XoftSpy

I had a run-in a week or two back with a seemingly harmless trojan called Backdoor.Beasty, or something like that. Afterward, and this may be completely unrelated, my computer restarted once on its own.

When I logged back in as the Administrator, the icons and taskbar on my desktop were gone. I could only get them back by endind the explorer.exe process and manually starting it back up with Task Manager > Run > explorer.

On top of that, however, it appears Winsock doesn't work correctly. Programs that need internet access to run complain about 'Windows sockets initialization failed.' I couldn't get my internet to work again until I restarted in safe mode, and performed a system restore to 5 days earlier.

But it seems this exact problem keeps popping up on its own again after several days. The system restore solves every symptom, until several days pass and the computer restarts for no reason and begins the cycle anew. As I've run a trojan scan, two different spyware/adware scanners, and Norton Antivirus multiple times, I think there's something CORRUPTED in my system files. I just dunno why it can be fixed and pop back up on its own at random intervals.

Thank you for your time.Fuse:  I'm a newbie, too, so take these as SUGGESTIONS and not INSTRUCTIONS!  However, I do know that sometimes a few "tricks" are needed to remove malware.  For example, using safe mode and turning off system restore.  You have to do this at times, because you can remove a trojan, and then if you do a restore, your PC goes right back to a point when the trojan was there! I typed this into Google: remove backdoor.beasty.  I saw lots of stuff about it.  Check it out.  Good Luck!Since you're using Norton Anti-virus, visit http://www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/backdoor.beasty.i.html and follow the instructions.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who posted trojan removal LINKS, but Norton isn't picking it up anymore and seemed to have deleted whatever variant it was. The only THING I can think of is that some of my windows files are corrupted or missing (system file check prompts me to use the installation disc to recover damaged DLLs, so I'm creating recovery discs for that now).

If SFC doesn't fix it for me, I PLAN on backing up my data files to an external HD, then doing a destructive system recovery back to factory settings. That should probably kill whatever got me in this mess, which I'm thinking more and more must have been some adware or spyware that took some system files with it when it went down.That would certainly fix the problem. (That is, unless the files you save are corrupted, but if it's all documents there should not be trouble.)

All I can say at this point is that any computer will always benefit from having a restore done on it. The reason it isn't done more often is the obvious hassle of putting programs and files back on it. I know I have something on my computer as well and it's messing with the start menu, and the only reason I'm not doing a TDR* on it is the fact that I have some time on my Norton subscription I want to finish before I restore and ditch Norton altogether.

In summary: It may or may not be necessary to do a TDR. But, in any case, your computer will be as fast as the day you bought it (possibly faster, if you upgraded afterward!).

*Totally Destructive Restore

When I used System Restore to jump back a few days, I had to un-install and re-install Norton. It didn't cancel out my subscription, but I did have to supply the install exe (There was an option to pay $10 for them to store it on a server for a year, but I just burned it to a dvd) and my subscription key/serial. But obviously, if you have only one, the other, or neither, it'd be tough to get back after a recovery.

Still, from my work on a few other HP PCs around the house, if your computer came with a Norton AV trial (typically 3 months?) you should get that free trial again when you perform a recovery.

As for my computer though, the SFC didn't solve anything. HP customer support said the recovery discs would be accepted by the SFC scan for use in patching corrupted DLLs, but they aren't. The only thing they could suggest was a partial system recovery, but that's pretty much in keeping with my BACKUP plan anyway.