Can someone please tell me what this type of virus does? I did everything with my effort trying to remove it (i.e. reinstalling my computer, using the power eraser tool...etc.) but none of them worked. The power eraser program says it's advanced and I am freaking out. Please help me out!!! Suggestions??
As far as I know this is a normal registry entry that controls whether desktop icons are hidden or visible and has nothing to do with a virus. See the post here in the Windows 7 forum titled Hide Icons. Right-click anywhere on your desktop and then select View from the pop-up menu - there should be an item called Show Desktop Icons that you can enable or disable (at least with Vista), and I believe the registry item you are concerned about saves the user preference for whether the desktop icons are visible or not.
The Norton Power Eraser is a very aggressive tool and frequently reports false positives (see delphinium's comments here in the Norton Protection Blog). I personally recommend that users always run this tool in diagnostic mode (see RichD's instructions here) unless they have confirmed that they are infected with a virus that cannot be removed by any other method.
If you want to run the occasional malware scan to supplement your Norton product I would recommend you use the free Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (MBAM) scanner. If you accept the 15-day trial period to test the Pro features of MBAM, make sure you disable the real-time protection mode in MBAM, since running more than one security program in real-time protection mode can create conflicts and allow malware to "sneak" past your Norton anti-virus protection.
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