My wife called me yesterday morning and says, when I booted up the computer it says I have been infected with a virus that is allowing someone to access my home computer and gave the culprits I.P. address. I told her to shut down and I would look at it when I got home. Now when you boot up it only makes it as far as the welcome screen???? I cant get it to go any further. anyone have any idea on what virus I have and how to fix it. I'm running windows XP on DELL system. thanks.

I'd unplug it from the Internet and try booting it up in Safe Mode. If that works, try to clean it up. If it won't boot in Safe Mode, fdisk it and reinstall a clean XP. You might as well wipe the drive. Your data isn't worth anything if XP is hosed and sharing it with the rest of the world.

I honestly don't know in the case of PCs, but on macs you can boot from the system install CD, and pull files you need off the drive before wiping it. We have something like safe mode, but if that doesn't work, you can boot from a CD/DVD and access the drive.

Just tossing it out, I have absolutely no idea.

matt

Try to repair windows first!NO ONE wants to lose their data...
boot up with the windows cd
when it boots up with the first install screen it will say:esc to quit,r to repair,enter to install windows ->hit enter to install windows
next screen ->agree to uela
next screen ->It will find your windows install->hit "R" for repair
It will go through and repair ALL your system files and get XP booting again.
Unplug from the internet and get your stuff BACKED UP!!!
Then try to fix it in 'safemode with networking' (when you boot up hit f8 to bring up the boot menu)
Scan the computer with your present anti-virus software,then go to http://housecall.trendmicro.com and scan your machine with that.Then you may need to edit the registry so the virus doesn't re-load itself.If you fix it,disable your 'system restore' reboot and enable 'system restore'.
If you still can't get it fixed then wipe it...but make sure you get your stuff backed up...unless of course you don't care about it.Then just disregaurd the rest of my rammbles.
Hope this helps!

You can always install another copy of XP. This will allow you to virus scan the disk and save any important stuff. If you don't want to worry about the old XP installation just delete it and run with the new, course you have to reinstall any programs.

Boy I remember when some hacker was using my computer to hack with back when I wasn't running a firewall.
Couldn't figure out why it was always so busy, the hard drive light was continually blinking and I always had to wait to do anything.

Haven't had any problems since I networked all my machines using a router.

I never did get that computer back after the DEA confiscated it from the guy that was working on it's house. :(