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Virus Writers Are Criminal

The dollar value I can assess to lost productivity to myself and my client because of the CWS CoolWebSearch (Inet20001) malware and viruses is ridiculous. Virus Writers and malware writers be damned! The stress of trying to remove this mess has taken time off the end of my life I’m sure. So not only are they stealing my money, they are killing me!

That said, today’s challenge. Take a windows 2000 workstation that would boot to the windows login screen then restart after reporting "svchost.exe The application failed to initialize properly. 0xc0000142" Booting to safe mode produced the same error (turns out this is from a copy in c:\temp\svchost.exe). Long and short. The machine did not have enough memory to run the Windows Ultimate Boot CD but did run the Linux Ultimate Boot CD and a virus scan showed some potentials. Notes taken. Damn Small Linux refuses to delete files from the hard drive. Go to the magic toolbox and pull out 6 floppies that are a modified set of Windows XP boot floppies with a Windows 2000 registry repair option (search MS.com) Registry repaired and files deleted from within DOS. Reboot reveals I missed much. Persistence prevails. (I’d go more detailed but I was cruising on a web application this morning and didn’t intend to have a 12 hour speed bump).