Hi guys, my PC was recently infected with a virus. Now I am a regular user of Crap Cleaner and Ad-Aware (I use both at least twice weekly), but my anti-virus protection was lacking. Anyway I used Norton 2006 to try and rid my PC of the virus but found it largely ineffective.

I'm now using Zone Alarm and find it much much better. I've managed to get rid of what I believe to be the main virus or source of my PC's issues. The lag has gone when using the net and my PC is generally smooth. With the exception of 1 problem.

My background has been changed to this...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/rexne1/virus1.jpg

And roughly every 30 secs to a minute I get a pop-up from my task bar saying this...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v215/rexne1/virus2.jpg

Now if I click on the box it installs a program called Brave Sentry, a supposed spyware detecter. So I'm lead to believe I have some spyware on my PC from Brave Sentry that is masking itself as a windows security issue. I identified a program on startup called xpudate.exe that I believe is part of it and I also deleted all Brave Sentry files I could find.

Ad-Aware and Zone Alarm don't seem to be able to rid my PC of whatever spyware/virus I have. Can anybody help me fix my background and get rid of this problem?

Any and all help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

http://www.2-spyware.com/remove-brave-sentry.html

Another good spyware tool is Spybot: S&D (http://www.safer-networking.org/).

You might also want to try restarting your PC into safe mode (hold F8 while your PC boots and then it will give you a choice to start in safe mode). Some spyware stops itself from being removed by just recreating itself straight away. In safe mode, only a minimum of processes are run. These means that the process that the spyware uses to recreate itself doesn't run and it can be removed easier.