There is no support for a beta. In a technical beta, you can at least get
some commiseration from your fellow technical testers, and even, perhaps,
advice from the vendor about what to do. The public betas that I have
bothered to read the newsgroups about have been complete free for alls--I
really haven't looked closely at them, but I think this group probably has
well above average participation by "regulars." and percentage of accurate
responses to questions.
I think free support from PSS for these issues is a good deal for
everyone--and I would have spoken up about it in more cases earlier had I
been clear what the policy is. They can't provide support for the beta
product. However, if you have an issue which could be spyware, running
Microsoft Antispyware will be their first suggestion, so an issue resulting
from removal qualifies for help.
Now--about what has gone wrong--It sure looks like a worm, but as I recall
there are some other issues that can invoke these symptoms--but that
recollection is pretty vague. It's been many months since I've dealt
regularly with this set of symptoms, so I don't have a list on hand from
most likely to least likely.
The PSS support folks are pros--they know how to get this fixed with the
minimum amount of risk to data and time consumed. The folks who have taken
this route in the beta so far have had good experiences, mainly. There were
some posts early on where folks were turned down for free support because of
the "unsupported beta" issue, but I now understand that was counter to
policy--somebody didn't understand the policies at the time.
I wouldn't recommend this except for "my machine is down" problems, or
problems more complex to fix than we typically can solve here--there have
been a couple of folks with keyloggers in place that I've referred--removing
these and keeping the keyboard functional isn't easy.
As I think about it, we could be referring some other folks If they have a
significant issue--Chris, with the Agobot variant, for example--and are
leery of going to third-parties for help, calling PSS is a logical thing for
them to do--I didn't think of it in that thread. Someone with a problem
which we know how to solve, but which requires steps that may be beyond
their capability to easily follow--significant Registry editing, for
example, might be candidates for phone support.
Newsgroups work pretty well for people with enough technical background to
describe their problem reasonably clearly, and follow perhaps imperfectly
defined steps to a solution.
You know from what you've read here though that lots of folks don't manage
that first part well, and we can only guess about the second in the absence
of further responses in a given thread.
