I recently had a run in with a nasty little worm that embedded itself into an autorun.ini file loaded on my Vista Toshiba Laptop's system. Avast located the little bugger and sent it to the programs virus vault. However, some odd events were going on at the time (AKA. exceptions being added to avast's ignore list which I had not placed there) but the issue seemed resolve once the worm was detected and removed. However, things have seemed to have changed as of recently.

The system is acting peculiar, but I cannot say it is infected with anything for sure. Some of the events happening seem to be potentially due to the evils of malware, but they could be system issues as the result of corrupted installations and other issues. Currently, I cannot download anything onto my computer. All files that are downloaded either automatically delete themselves, are disrupted during installation and incomplete versions of that which I am trying to acquire, or are said to be a good copy but have taken up no space on the actual disk. When such files are run they either install buggy versions of their original or they fail utterly and are not even recognized as a windows files.

In addition to the above mentioned issue Google Chrome fails to initialize for reasons I cannot seem to find. There is nothing that seems to be detectable by the system as faulty or bad. In truth all scanners utterly fail to find anything that might be suspicious, thus far I had run Mbam, HijackThis, and Dr.WebCure-It to no avail. I also recently ran a System File Check, and found bizzare entries within the log such as what follows:

"Ignoring duplicate ownership for directory [l:58{29}]"\??\C:\Windows\System32\setup" in component Microsoft-Windows-RasConnectionManager, Version = 6.0.6001.18000, pA = PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE_INTEL (O), Culture neutral, VersionScope = 1 nonSxS, PublicKeyToken = {l:8 b:31bf3856ad364e35}, Type neutral, TypeName neutral, PublicKey neutral"

First the duplicate ownership item has me mildly worried. Second the fact that there is a ?? elevation prior to the C drive makes me suspicious. Third Malwarebytes has hung on the same file within the system consistently, which has me quite worried as to the nature of the files loaded on the system.

Now, most people at this point would just reinstall windows, but I want to see what the core of this issue is. I want to solve this puzzle and better understand why these weird errors are taking place. Tomorrow I'll be buying an external hard drive to back-up all my important data so that I can analyze this problem without fear of loosing things. That way I can go as deep into this mystery as necessary until I finally either find an answer or need to use the recovery disk to get the computer to boot.

I'd really like any and all advice that anyone could provide, I'm coming to the edge of my own abilities and could use the guidance of someone more advanced in computer troubleshooting then myself. Thank you for your time, and I hope you enjoy your day! !

Sincerely,
~Trav

Hi and welcome to the forum!

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Scan and post logs - read note at bottom in green
If you're having Malware related issues with your computer that you're unable to resolve.

1. Please read and follow the instructions provided here: I'm infected - What do I do now?
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