Media Player not starting

[John Smith]

System is XP home on a HP pavilion Ze1230. Daughter informs me
that machine has a virus. AVG hasn't been updated since 5/4/04 and who know
how long since it's been scanned. Machine spends most of its time at college
downloading the latest and greatest pieces of malware out there.
Dumped Norton AV 2002 since it hadn't been used. Dumped a bunch
of useless other drivel taking up hard drive space.
D'l latest AVG defs and add Adaware with most recent defs. Ran AVG to find
PSW.agent trojan. Two variants, h & j. AVG cleaned those up.
Adaware found 187 malware entries, 65 of which were Registry
values. Wild tangent and various others.
Machine seems fairly clean now but having trouble with Media
Player. Clicking on desktop icon only produces a chime but no program
opening up. If I right click and check properties, then "find target" it
doesn't help.
Where should I start looking further?

 

[James Wilson]

A re-install (of media player I mean)usually fixes that
issue, which I too had the honor of doing thanks to some
nastiness from some very impressive code downloads. The
latest media player is on this site, but you probably knew
that.
Hope it helps

 

[Hilary Karp]

John, you should also run other spyware/adware/malware programs besides
Adaware. One program often times catches things the others don't:

Cwshredder
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/files/cwshredder.zip

Spybot Search and Destroy
http://www.safer-networking.org

Make sure you update them after downloading, then boot to safe mode to
run them.

To help keep the system clean once it's clean use these:

Spywareblaster
www.javacoolsoftware.com/sbdownload.html

IE-SPYAD
http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~ehowes/resource.htm

You also might want to run a couple of the other online / downloadable
virus scanning engines:

Bit Defender Online Virus Scan:
http://www.bitdefender.com/scan/license.php

Symantec Online Virus and Security Scan:
http://security.symantec.com/ssc/home.asp

TrendMicro:
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/housecall/start_corp.asp

McAfee Stinger, Downloadable Virus Scanner:
http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=stinger

McAfee Online Virus Scan:
http://www.mcafee.com/myapps/mfs/default.asp

Panda ActiveScan
http://www.pandasoftware.com/activescan/com/activescan_principal.htm

RAV AntiVirus - Scan Online
http://www.ravantivirus.com/scan/

 

[John Smith]

Thanks for the suggestions. Hadn't gotten around to D'l Spybot S&D 1.3.
Ditched version 1.2 since it's not being supported with 1.3 out. Will go get
that along with Hijack this which I've used in the past on the other laptop.
To reinstall Media Player I'll need the recovery CD that came
with the HP I assume? Not sure on the reinstallation process.
Thanks.