cannot find lsass.exe

[Eric The IT Novice]

This is on a friend's computer:

His adware program alerted him that he had
been "hijacked". It asked him if he wanted to remove the
file that was infected. He said "yes".

Now everytime he boots his computer, it gets a stop error
stating that it cannot find lsass.exe and goes to an "a:"
prompt.

My guess is that the lsass.exe file in the
C:\windows\system32 directory is damaged or missing.

Anyone else seen something like this?

Thanks in advance,

Eric

 

[Mike Bright MSP]

Eric,

If the Adware program was a good one, it wouldn't have removed the quite
important Windows System file the "lsass.exe" is, my guess it that it
removed a file called that but not the one out of the Windows\System32
directory. When you login into Windows search for it and see if it's still
there (my guess is it will).

Then next issues is the fact that the other copy of "lsass.exe" has been
deleted and is still being access/reference in the registry. Have a go at
this:

Start > Run > "msconfig.exe"

Click the Startup tab and see if you can see the file in there at all, if it
is post back with it's location and we can see what it is.

Regards

Mike Bright MCP, MSP

e:[email protected]

 

[Time Traveller]

you should be able to restore this file using the recovery console and your
XP install disk.
It is indeed in the system32 folder