I had turned her Automatic Windows Updates off. Unless she turned it on
somehow this shouldn't be the problem.
Can Microsoft Security Essentials even coexist with her other real-time
scanner ... Avira Free?
I don't know about those two, but I had Norton AV and AVG real-time
scanners running together for 2 years or more, with never a problem.
I disabled one for a day or two and figured out which one generated
which message, that is, which one was finding the viruses (because
only one message would appear) but I forget which one it was. Might
have to do with which one I installed first, I suppose.
Whichever one it was, it found the virus etc. 98 % of the time. But
about 1 time out of 50, or maybe 1 out of 15, the other one did, which
I guess means that the first one failed to find something. That just
made me want to keep them both, despite the warnings I read.
in 2 years the second one found a virus 3 or 4 times, which would mean
that the first one found something 45 or 60 tims. That might be about
right.
I couldn't draw many conclusions from 3 or 4 examples, but iirc the
*name* of the virus was, all but maybe the first time when I didn't
pay attention, only one word, with no period or extension. But then
again, those don't reflect anything about the actual file, do they?
Oh, yeah, eventually I had my email program, Eudora, set, and it's
still set, to not dl any email that was greater than 40K, which
allowed almost all the real emails, but very few virus attachments
were small enough to get by. (When an email is too big, Eudora will
still dl the first thousand bytes or something, mostly the headers. If
I look at the headerss and subject, I decide I want the email, Eudora
allows easy 1 by 1 exceptions, and it gets the whole email. .
Same here. I keep telling her not to open attachments, not to install
software when offered, and not to visit websites except for the few she
always visits (QVC, etc.). But she obviously has done something.
I posted to say that last Thursday, I got the Microsoft security
Essentials virus this thread is about, on a frend's computer.
I had her computer because after the XP welcome to windows screen, she
got a blue screen with text, and could go no further.
There's a thread here up about a week or less that describes what
happened, but in short, AVG on a flash drive got rid of what it called
CRYPTIC.AZC, and the computer worked for about 10 minutes, when a fake
Microsoft Sec. Ess. told me I had a problem.
I fell for it and clicked on something, and in the last 16 hours I've
removed 57 instances of 15 or 20 different malware. But I didn't click
on any attachments, I hadn't installed any software, and I don't think
I even opened the web broswer. So maybe your mother didn't either.
Did I get them all in the 10 minutes the computer was running
before the new problem started,
Or in the 10 minutes or so it ran afterwards, though not connected
to the net, a viruses whose files were already present might when
installed themselves
Or did the computer have it when I got the computer, but AVG didn't
find it all, and it flourished after I started windows to completion?
