.vbs scripting host error.

[ArnoldLLerch]

My friend's computer began behaving strangely and, having put in a call to Gateway and being told to call Symantec (or pay Gateway $3.00 per minute) and finding Symantec non-responsive she called me. I ran the Norton Anti-virus 2000 scan and found nothing. Acting on a hunch I did a file search on My Computer for *.vbs. Found about 8 files. The first two were, "HCU C:\WINDOWS\OPTIONS\cabs 1kb VBScript 6/8/2000 5:00PM" and "hcu C"\WINDOWS\HELP\MIT\training\WINMIL\cbm 2kb VBScript 8/3/2000 4:35PM"

Plus a half dozen others in Excel, Powerpoint, Access, etc.

Are these legitimate WindowsME filenames?

And, if not, how do I eliminate them?

ARNi LEE
Waiting for FMD

[ArnoldLLerch]

?

[Steve R Jones]

friend's computer began behaving strangely

Please describe "strangely."

[Comtech]

If you right click the .vbs files, you can open them with notepad, and thus edit them.
Read the contents, you'll soon see if it's a virus, or legit. Opening them with notepad IN NO WAY will infect your computer, you're just observing, not running.

[stevenvee]

Arnold,

You may want to check out Computer Associates site. www.cai.com (http://www.cai.com) They usually have excellent information regarding viruses and what to do to protect your system, i.e. .vbs files.

[ArnoldLLerch]

Okay, "strangley" okay, okay uh like it's an 800MHz AMD Athlon (?) with 256Mb RAM, 20GB HDD, 56K Modem (I know, modems stink) and all of a sudden it won't connect to AOL servers or local AT&T Dial-Up connections, has become unstable and locks up or crashes fairly easily. The one recent addition to this pride of the Gateway fleet is a DVD-ROM.
So, I checked my Millenium installation (my server for my home LAN) and it has the same Visual Basic Scripting files so that pretty much rules out those particular worms. Mine is stable as a rock on an old Digital 200MMX w/96Megs RAM. I did not check the hardware visually. Will do that this evening to make sure the physical jumpering and positioning on the ribbon cable matches.

Thanks,

ARNi LEE
Waiting for FMD