Virus

[christine1]

I have a situation where one of our pc's seems to be infected with a virus, from opening an email attachment, what happened is there is a hipnotic black and white circle swirling in the middle of the screen, cannot shutdown PC or anything. Our viurs checker did not detect it, does anyone know what virus would cause this, it's a long shot but I thought I'd ask, thanks!

[DiDoH]

Have you got the latest updates of your virus protection software ?
If so and you are sure you have a virus you should try scanning with another virus program there are alot off them out there, try inoculate´s it is free.

If no virus software can detect your virus i think it is unlikely that you have a virus.

I usually format my hard drive and set up my computer from scratch when it behaves strangely and i cant fix it.

[christine1]

We have InoculateIT. The pc's last sig update was about two weeks ago. I may have to format the drive and start over, just curious if anyone know what virus name may be causing this (there are so many out there I know!). Thanks for the reply.

[big_block_buick]

i may be off,but cant you get a dos based anti virus on boot disk and go at it in that way...something i thought i read..anyone?

[DiDoH]

Yes that is true, try booting the system with a uninfected ms-dos boot diskett
and get some ms dos virus program and put it on another diskhette and let it scan your system.

I am not sure but i think norton antivirus has a dos virus program

[sharder8]

Actually, it's a program called Optical.exe. That's why none of the AV programs caught it.

I've had it for a long time and haven't had a problem shutting it down, but someone may have made some changes to yours. Or, when I openned it, I openned it in a shell and not within my Eudora E-mail.

(It's 22kb big.)

Harder

[This message has been edited by sharder8 (edited 01-22-2001).]

[christine1]

How did you shut down the optical program? It is not in list of programs running? Thanks.

[Bsdboy]

Just a suggestion from a new guy
Can't she just delete Optical.exe and
maybe edit the regestry to remove it?
I would like to hear from more experienced
members on this.

[sharder8]

Like I mentioned earlier, mine runs in a shell and I just hit escape to close it.

If you run "find" and look for Optical.exe and then delete it, it should be gone, but like mentioned above, you may have to remove it from your registry also.

Harder

[christine1]

I was able to run find, there is not a file named optical.exe on the drive. I am able to run the virus checker which Im doing now, cannot escape out of the darn thing (spiral picture), it's hard to run apps because it stays in the foreground. Will post a final note when I get resolved, thanks for everyone's help. Well virus checker just finished and no viruses detected.

[Bsdboy]

Christine it seems you don't have optical.
Have you checked your startup folder and
msconfig startup for anything funny listed?
I doubt you will find anything but it's
worth a try.Have you tried safe mode?
Hopefully you can check out yuor system
there without that spiral in the way.
Good luck

[christine1]

Here's the culprit, a file called akmoakmo.exe was in the windows/system directory, it was called upon by the win.ini file to run. Weird.

[Bsdboy]

How did you find it was akmoakmo?
That was good hunting!

[christine1]

Actually, just a hunch to check the win.ini file (it was difficult to see anything with that darn spiral in the way), anyway, it always started up once windows was loaded and running, nothing was in the startup, it was on the second line of the win.ini file to load, I never heard of the application it wanted to run, rem'd it out, rebooted, and there you have it, the spiral was gone.

[sharder8]

http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/biggrin.gif Outstanding job Christine1!! http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/biggrin.gif

I wonder if it is a variant of the Optical.exe? That sucker will get to you real quick, especially if your not feeling well to begin with.

In the mean time, you may want to report it to Trend, Norton, McAfee, etc. This may be one that they want to watch out for.

Harder