I'm visiting the folks, and mom was complaining about how slow her computer has become. Of course it has malware popup ads that say things like "Viruses on you computer!!! Click here!" or "Clean Your Registry."
Here's a short list of what I found:
Control Panel - Firewall:
The firewall had been turned off and could not be found.
I would later be able to check the firewall for unwanted programs connecting to the internet
Control Panel - Programs:
Under "Install/Uninstall Programs" there were many programs that obviously needed to be uninstalled. For many programs I Googled the names of the programs to identify the malware. I was looking up something like "CSActive" on Google and the first result said "I'm working on my mom's computer and I found a program called CSActive....." which was good for a belly laugh.
Control Panel - Programs:
Some things obviously needed to be uninstalled:
Optimizers and registry cleaners
Toolbars (Ask, Yahoo and others)
Downloaders
Media player that you never heard of.
"Bargain Hunter"
"ALOT"
Anything that had not been used in the last several years.
Anything left over from old antiviral software like MacAffee.
At least the PC had not been set to search for a proxie server.
Browsers
Any extensions and plugins such as toolbars and downloaders.
Make sure pop-up blockers are turned on.
Antivirus Software
The computer already had Microsoft Security Essentials, which found a Trojan and a worm. This also restored my access to the control panel firewall settings, and I was able to turn on the firewall.
I also downloaded Malwarebytes free version at Malwarebytes.org. Scanning with this found 99 instances of malware, which is not unusual in situations like this.
During this process I was restarting the computer every hour or so so that changes would be completed.
After things seemed cleaned up, I ran defrag, which helped a little bit.
We also went to WalMart and bought a LinkSys wireless router so visitors can get internet access.
This was on an XP machine, but if it was Windows 7 I would have also turned the desktop theme to "basic" so the computer was not wasting resources generating pretty thumbnail images.
Anybody else want to share tips or experiences? And what would you recommend for ad blocking software?