I have a laptop with XP home. It had a bunch of viruses, ran antivirus, it
cleaned it up, rebooted, goes to welcome screen, shows user, if you click it
it flashes up the main screen for just a second, goes back to welcome screen
saying logging off user. Thats all it will do. Any ideas how I can fix this?
Thanks in advance for any help.
The idea that a virus is just a nuisance, and one that can be
eliminated by running an anti-virus program, is completely false. A
virus is a piece of software designed to do irreparable damage to your
computer.
Does that mean that viruses can never be removed? No, of course not.
In practice it is often possible to remove a virus, especially if you
haven't been infected with it very long. However, you say you had "a
*bunch* of viruses." The more you have, the less likely it is that
they can all be properly removed, and with a "bunch," it's highly
likely that your situation was bad enough to be uncorrectable.
Moreover, you told us nothing about which viruses they were, nor what
anti-virus program you used to identify them, and which you used to
remove them. Is your anti-virus program good enough to identify all of
them? Many anti-virus programs, including some of the most popular
ones, are very poor. And why didn't the anti-virus program identify
these viruses as you got infected instead of waiting until now?
Without all that information, it's next to impossible to tell you
anything definitive about your situation.
One more point: if you had multiple virus infections, it's also likely
that you had multiple spyware infections. You've also told us nothing
about which (if any) anti-spyware programs you run.
So please provide *all* the missing information
Be aware that it may be very likely in your case that you will need to
do a format and clean reinstallation of Windows.
