Cannot Open .dll or .exe files

ajm123

My father's laptop has recently had a problem whereby any desktop shortcuts to applications cannot open. The window asking you to choose an application to open it with pops up. I ran AVG virus checker and a virus was found. Unfortunately, I cannot remember the name. AVG was unable to delete the virus, so I merely searched for it and deleted it manually.
The laptop will not even allow me to open add/remove programs in control panel as it cannot find rundll.exe.

I have searched for this file and it does exist on the laptop. Similarly, other files which cannot be found also exist - it seems that the links to files have broken.

Can anyone help or explain what has happened?

Thanks

LincsLad_3

Sadly, with many PC viruses it is not as simple as just searching for a file or files and hitting the delete button.

Many modern viruses make some kind of underlying change to the Windows operating system, as you are now discovering to your cost. It really is quite important to deal with each virus in a specific way, as detailed on many of the anti-virus websites.

Many viruses also copy themselves as a file called rundll.exe, (adding to or overwriting the original rundll file) normally into a folder such as C:\Windows\, to ensure that they (the virus files) run whenever the PC starts. The original rundll.exe file is often renamed and moved somewhere else on the PC, but the name and location varies from one virus to another.

Without knowing the name of the virus concerned, it's a bit difficult to know what to suggest next, but for a start, I would ensure that all traces of virus files and spyware (see this thread for details of programs to do that). It would probably not hurt to run Stinger as well.

Could you also let us know which version of Windows the laptop is using. It might be possible to find copies of rundll.exe files that will allow you to run Control Panel etc again.

You will then have to fix the file associations (screwing up these is another common virus action) via Windows Explorer (Tools...Folder Options....File Types in WinXP for example.)

You could have a bit of work ahead of you, but short of reformatting the laptop's hard drive and reinstalling Windows, it is going to be the quickest way. :-/