For more than two weeks my entire business has been stymied by a virus that fills up by hard drive with folders in Windows
Temp folder, that searches and posts on the internet confidential financial and tax information.
Both home and office computers are affected. My attempted solutions include:
Downloading the latest virus definitions (on each computer), including the Intelligent Updater
Running complete system scans on each computer
Installing and running Norton Power Eraser (including rootkit scan) on each computer
Downloading the Norton Bootable Recovery Tool, making a disk and trying to recover my system.
Meanwhile I have spent double-digit numbers of hours waiting and chatting with seven different Norton techs, supervisors and case managers, all of whom have failed to help me. They have me try one or two actions, then tell me to reboot, and then I never hear from them again, because the emails for reconnecting come hours later and in some cases never.
I told some of the Norton supervisors that I have a complete backup of my computer from before the virus started. (Clean backup 8-14-2011 made by Norton Save and Restore). I asked whether restoring this backup could solve my problem, and they said no, don't do that, "I will help you."
Norton IS and Power Eraser do not find the suspicious files and folders which I have observed attacking my computers:
in folder C:\Windows2\Prefetch
NuanceWDS.exe in folder C:\ ProgramFiles\ Nuance\Paperport (Gmail would not let me send this file to Norton, so I changed its name to NuanceWDS.ex_)
OmniPageCSDK16 in folder c:\Windows2\Temp\Nuance
Folder 002116
Folder 002968
Folder 003056
Folder 003924 All in folder c:\Windows2\Nuance\OmniPageCSDK16
I gave up waiting for Norton tonight and tried to use the Rebootable Recovery Tool. I managed to boot to it, but
Norton spit back an "invalid product key" message. I reconfirmed in my Norton Account that my NIS subscription is good for 95 more days, and the Product Key is correct.
After all the Norton tools and advice I have had, the virus or whatever it is, is still strong and active on
my computer. I keep it temporarily at bay by keeping the Windows2\Temp folder open and by keeping
Windows Task Manager open. Each time the files regenerate themselves, I erase them from these two
places. This makes the computer safe enough to write or chat with Norton, but for nothing else. I have
removed everything else from the computers.
My product license for NIS is for 3 computers, and Norton says that I have used all three activations, because I had to
replace a dead hard drive in one of the two computers I have. Both computers are dead in the water because Norton
cannot fix them, and if I reformat and reinstall Windows, Norton only offers me to buy more product licenses. There seems
no way to get Norton to understand that I am using only two licenses.
I am desperate, and I really hope someone else knows what this malware is and how to expunge it.
sorry to start out on the forum with such huge problems.
Maggie2011