Help! Think I have viruses on my laptop and I don't know what to do.

[CubaCat]

I've had my laptop on today for the first time in a week or so. It was fine for the first few hours this afternoon, but about an hour ago it came up with a balloon saying 'Malicious programme has been detected. Click here to protect your computer.' (this balloon is popping up approx. every 60 seconds or so). So I clicked and it did a scan, which came up with 42 viruses including trojan and some worm or other (I'm not techy minded in the slightest, so not sure what this means). Once scan was done, it said to remove these I needed to pay. I already have AVG free and Malware free, so clicked on them to scan and clean instead, but then a balloon came up saying 'avg is infected with such and such virus', so it won't let me use these to remove the infections. I tried downloading AVG free 2011 and the balloon came up again saying it was infected with a virus, even though I hadn't downloaded it.

Since this happened I can't use msn messenger, and other programmes that have an icon in the blue bar at the bottom, as when I click on the blue bar to extend it, it just closes again.

Help! What do I need to do please?

Hello CubaCat,

I fear your machine is infected with some malware/spyware.

As a general rule of thumb, never click on any popup/link which says "Click here to speed up your computer" or "click here to clean your computer" or "virus detected, click here to remove" etc etc

basically these are bogus messages and they rely on tricking the user in thinking they have a much worse issue than they really do. Hoping that at the end of the "virus scan" you will end up buying the dodgy software to protect your machine.

Anyway, lets get you fixed.

Restart your machine and keep pressing the F8 key. This will give you various options to start your machine.

Select the option for "safe mode with networking"

Once the machine has started, download this file:

www.worriedparentonline.com/fixes/SmitfraudFix.exe

and save it to your desktop.

Double-click smitfraudfix.exe and then select 2 and hit Enter to delete infect files.

You will be prompted: Do you want to clean the registry ? answer Y (yes) and hit Enter.

It may ask you to replace your "wininet.dll" file, if it does just select yes.

Once finished, reboot your machine.

Log back in and do a full scan with AVG (update the definitions first if needed)

Hopefully you will be clean and those popups will be gone.

Good luck

THanks for the advice WP but it hasn't worked . Pressing F8 didn't do anything, so I couldn't select 'safe mode with networking', but I went on to do the next stage of your advice. I've got to the point where I need to run AVG scan but it still won't let it run, or let me run the 2011 version. It comes up with a message along the lines of 'Avg infected by blaster worm. Please activate Spyware Protection to protect your computer.' And the spyware balloons are still popping up. Don't know what to do next - any ideas?

When you first boot up your PC, before windows starts to load, what "Fn" (where "n" is a number - usually F2, F8, F10 - referring to the funtion keys) options are offered at the bottom of the screen?

Lazydog - no idea. Let me close down and start up again, and I'll let you know. My laptop is old, so this might take me 20 mins or so but I'll be back soon, thanks.

In the bar at the bottom of the screen it says 'Press F2 for...' (I missed what it was for as it moved away from that screen very quickly). Does that help at all?

at the point you see "press F2 for setup", keep pressing F8 ...

Keep pressing it until you get a boot menu.

are you running XP / Vista / Windows 7 ?

At long last I've sorted it, thanks for all your help!

What sorted it for you?