Is my registry damaged?

londonman81

I ran Spybot recently to get rid of the Contravirus 2.0 which had been sitting on my machine for several months.

After running this, the Contravirus seems to have disappeared (no more pop-up windows), however I am now getting frequent errors when I use Internet Explorer. Often it will come up with a 'send report' window and then the program closes.

Also, my Firefox seems to have been malfunctioning. If I close down Firefox I cannot open it again until I go to Task Manager and do 'End Process' on it.

This is all very annoying because my computer is less than a year old and I have not got much use out of it yet.

Do these symptoms sound like possible registry damage from when I ran Spybot to clear out Contravirus 2.0?

If so, what do I do to fix it??

Many thanks for any help!

superscaper

If you've had one virus on there I'd check that there's no other malware before starting to look for solutions to problems. I'd go through the malware removal guide first to thoroughly check the pc. After that you may need to run checkdisk to potentially fix any windows files that are "broken". Next stage after that (assuming still problems) would maybe to do a windows repair (if it really is a problem with the registry and windows is a mess). Remember the backing up though.

Depending on how eager and confident you are a fresh install would negate the need for the other things (some people do that when infected just to make sure). It can be a drastic action to take but is not much different from the windows repair that you may (but may not) need to do.

russ_gillespie

It does sound like those programs have been damaged.

It may sound obvious but the first thing you can do is remove them both from Add/Remove programs and reinstall them.

Have you ran spybot a second time?

Also, you may want to download and run CCleaner (https://www.ccleaner.com). It will clear out all unneeded temporary files and it also has a section for cleaning the registry. This is the only program I trust with the registry quite simply because I've used it on hundreds of PCs and it's never given me a problem.

Hope this helps.


Russ

benbread

Run Tune-Up Utilities 2008 (Free 30 day trial, really useful) and from there run Registry Checker and Registry Defragmenter, this might help fix your system.

http://www.tune-up.com/products/tuneup-utilities/

russ_gillespie

RE: superscrapers post: There are a few other things that we could try prior to a windows repair. That's a little OTT for this kind of issue.

londonman81 post back here and let us know how you get on.

superscaper

russ_gillespie wrote: »

RE: superscrapers post: There are a few other things that we could try prior to a windows repair. That's a little OTT for this kind of issue.

londonman81 post back here and let us know how you get on.

"(if it really is a problem with the registry and windows is a mess)"

I know there are other solutions, the main point was to clear the malware first and then I thought I'd add a quick general summary of things. I was just being lazy in that I didn't type all the possible steps in between which largely depend on what happens after the previous stages. If you notice it was the very last stage I mentioned (i.e. last resort).

I knew someone would come on and mention about windows repair/installs was over the top which is why I added the qualifiers so there was no need to comment on it. I guess it didn't work.

londonman81

Russ - Thanks for your posts.

I did uninstall Firefox and re-installed it again. But it gave exactly the same problem afterwards too.

I have ran Spybot a couple of times. The problems have still persisted.

I now plan to CCleaner. Will this actually fix problems in the registry? What are the chances of it making things worse?

Thanks!

superscaper

londonman81 wrote: »

I now plan to CCleaner. Will this actually fix problems in the registry? What are the chances of it making things worse?

Thanks!

Save a copy of the registry when it prompts you to. The reason I didn't mention any registry cleaners (and I use ccleaner myself regularly) is that in my experience if the registry is already actually damaged they can make things worse. They tend to only work best at trimming superfluous material and broken links but not so good when the registry itself has major problems/corruption. It could well be in your case that they are simple errors to fix. I'd still clear possible malware first though.

londonman81

Superscraper - Thanks.

I have just finished running CCleaner. I chose both the 'Cleaner' option and the 'Registry' option.

I backed up the registry, but if I do have a problem going forward and want to re-install old regsitry, what do I do with this file?

Thanks again!

londonman81

Since running CCleaner, I have tried re-visiting one of the websites which was causing my Internet Explorer to close down and the same thing happened.

The link is specifically on telesavers.co.uk, when I try to click on access numbers to countries beginning with 'U'.

Any clues what the problem is?!!

BTW: I did let it send an error reprt.

russ_gillespie

superscaper my post was for the benefit of londonman81. I didn't want him to go ahead with a repair install without getting back to us first. That's all

londonman do you have you Windows XP CD? If you do, put it in the drive and then click Start -> Run, then type: sfc /scannow.

This should repair broken windows system files which may have been damaged by the spyware.

Also, what antivirus package do you have? Have you run a full scan with it?