I have two topics this week. First, it appears my malware saga has come to a satisfactory solution. As I discussed in a previous column, I tried Malwarebytes AntiMalware to exorcise demons on a system running XP Professional SP2. It worked . . . for 24 hours. The next day the PC started acting flaky again, even though AntiMalware was declaring the system clean.
I was about to throw in the virtual towel and strip and rebuild the machine when I discovered an online service called Reimage. Reimage downloads an ActiveX control to your Windows PC, which then launches an Internet Explorer shell that scans your system.
Reimage then produces a report of what its found and offers, for a price of $65 for a single PC ($79 for three machines), to fix your problems. The way this magic is done is by removing bogus files and replacing modified files from Reimage’s online repository of Windows systems components.
So, I downloaded, rebooted in safe mode, ran the scan, let Reimage perform the fix, and voil