My Mom has unwittingly opened a virus in outlook express.  She has McAfee ver. 4.  I ran  that and it found nothing.  I went the the McAfee web site, downloaded the latest update for that version, installed it, and now when I try to run scan, McAfee bombs.  I made a bootup disk in McAfee, killed  the computer, cranked it up and it has been running since Sunday night at around 8pm.  Last night, I stopped by and it was on Pass #4 and still scaning.  What does this mean?  Do I leave it alone and let it run?  Help!!!!!!!!!  

Honestly, if it were me, I would fdisk that computer and start fresh.  Outlook and Outlook Express are petri dishes for viri.  They can be made relatively safe but they aren't by default and making them safe disables many of the things that make them so convenient.  I would recommend trying out Eudora or Netscape Messenger.  Better yet, you could try an operating system highly resistant if not immune to viri, Linux.  [:)]

BTT

Norton CORP edition is pretty good.

Same damn thing happened to me.  Got a backup disk?  Thats about the best thing you can do...crash it and start over again.

Try downloading a fix dix for the Sircam virus somewhere, and try running it.  Before downloading or running anything though, MAKE SURE you turn off your currently running anti-virus program!!!

It sounds a lot like the Sircam, because it mutates and isn't easily found without just simply running the FIX DISK.

This definatley sounds like the sircam virus.  It starts by f-ing up the virus scan and then moves onto all the other .exe's eventually totally disabling your computer.  I have removed this virus from 15~20 computers at work.  The trick is to remove it from the registry first which requires manually editing the registry.  It then needs to be removed from the mailboxes and finally the trash bins, then you need to run the updated virus scan to get the infected files.  The boot disk only runs a partial virus definition and will not find it.  This whole procedure is outlined at [url]www.mcafee.com[/url]  HAVE FUN!!!!!


Nuckles.  [smash]

Nuckles I think you are right, I noticed the registry file came up as being messed up.

Oh boy.  Thanks for the info guys, at least its Moms and not mine! [:D]

Somebody at work infected my laptop with sircam and Mcafee didn't catch it.  I suspect that it installed itself through one of my network shares, but I don't know how it got by the permissions.  I noticed that my autoexec.bat file had "@c:\recycled\sirc32.exe" in it.  I ran the cleaner and rebooted.  That seemed to get rid of it.  Maybe I should switch to Norton.

Do yourself a favor, go to this page-   [url]www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/[email protected][/url]

Download the sircam fix engine and use it.  Of course, if you've got a cleaner that Mcafee finally scraped together, you may not need to.  They had enough time to come up with something, so maybe they got it right.

Once your Mom's computer is virus free, do her a favor and get her to dump Mcafee  They are a big ripoff.  With Norton, this would never have happened.