Went out with a friend yesterday and she bought herself a laptop - Compaq Presario 2100. Last night she fired it up, did the XP registration and then tried to set up an internet connection. She got her freeserve details wrong so it didn't work, so she stuck in a freebie BT Openworld disc to try and setup an account with them. It dialled up it's registration number and within a minute or so she started getting all the classic Blaster worm symptoms with shutdowns etc etc. She wasn't running any antivirus software.

I went round today and ran the symantec Blaster removal tool which identified it and deleted it (apparently). I then ran the Microsoft patch file. THis copied out it's files OK but the installation window closed itself down after a few seconds and it all disappeared. I assumed it had installed so I then set about installing Norton AV 2003. It all installed OK but it just won't start. Splash screen appears and then the process is almost instantly killed. Tried uninstalling and reinstalling with no joy. Same with LIve Update - that too is almost instantly killed when started.

If I start in Safe Mode then the program runs okay. It ran a system scan in Safe Mode and found nothing...

I've also noticed that if I open Regedit the window opens for 5 seconds then that too is killed.

Anyone have any ideas? Software helpline is next to useless and my friend is getting to the point where she's going to take the thing back and forcibly insert it into the salesman...

Does the Compaq come with a rebuild CD?

Only really used Tosh's and Dell's, but the Tosh used to have a CD that would completely wipe the hard disk and re-install all the original software back to the state when you first switched it on.

Moral of the story is get AV software and a Firewall before sticking any laptop/PC near the Internet :(

Stefan

It's possibly infected with other things, possibly. One of the classic things of virus installation is that it'll stop norton and other things from running.

The blaster thing is a pain, we had a new machine, and for a laugh, connected it to the 'outside' part of our network, within 5 seconds, Norton picked up the Blaster virus trying to get on it! nasty!

Personally what I would do is reformat and reinstall XP, then get norton on there, then do the internet connection