Looks like my PC has taken a hit.  My hotmail had tons of outgoing messages in the sent folder during the night (weird).

I got a game CD from an order I received from overstock.com.  The CD was flimsy so I popped it in my CD to check the contents and it immediately was flagged by my AV (Microsoft Security Essentials) so I removed it.

Now my PC stops for about 5-10 min at the BIOS screen, everytime I open Firefox the homepage is changed to search.conduit.com or something - it comes back after being reset in FF control panel.
Also, my Zune is now missing 500 songs from my collection that were there last night (same hotmail login)

Never seen anything like this.

What other AV should I run, is there a decent free one out there?

How do you check for a rootkit and remove it?

Thanks!

I use AVG, Hijack this.  There is a couple more that I use to remove adware but Cant remember what its called.  all free.

AVG. Great tool and free.

Malwarebytes for all the other stuff. It is the shiznit!

Avast is as good as freeware anti-virus gets.  Running multiple AV products will hurt performance and most likely they will not play nicely together.  That said, a rootkit isn't a virus anyway, and many AV programs won't detect them.

I use:

Avast
Hijack This
Spybot Search & Destroy
"Noscript" firefox plugin.

And, most importantly, a very healthy does of paranoia.  I don't steal software, music, movies, etc.

Malwarebytes works pretty darn well for a free one and I run that periodically.  Trend Micro is my favorite for a paid AV, but as was mentioned, they don't always detect rootkits (not that you necessarily have one).



You might also try a system restore to a date prior to the CD insertion.

Not so much....

MSSE is working waaaaaaay better for me than AVG did.

www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/



If you THINK you are root kitted.. Format your HD and start over.