Okay, I'll just list the symptoms. I've been getting attacked by viruses in the past few days, and thought I had cleaned them up, but now I'm not sure.
Symptoms:
1) I'm running Norton Antivirus 2006, fully updated, and when I try to bring up its Main Window, it comes up but is utterly useless. The window shows only a "snapshot" of the desktop portion that was below it. No buttons or options are visible or usable.
2) I've been getting numerous Internet Explorer pop-ups that call themselves Mozilla Firefox pop-ups. The content of the pop-ups include advertisements for programs that guard against malicious software and programs that scan computers for issues.
3) The Internet Explorer process "iexplore.exe" starts on its own constantly. This, I'm guessing, is how the pop-ups come up. I don't even use Internet Explorer. I will use the Task Manager to end the "iexplore.exe" process, but then a few minutes later it reappears, showing (or at least trying to show) a new pop-up window.
4) I ended a few unknown processes (a risky business, I know, and I don't remember which ones they were). That was the point at which the constant pop-ups stopped appearing and were replaced by the periodic pop-up error message, "The requested lookup key was not found in any active activation context."
5) The browsers I use are MSN and Firefox. MSN is now incapacitated; when I sign in and open a new window, the window is blank, and no matter what website I try to visit, it remains blank. I can still use Firefox; that's how I'm typing this message.
Any advice? Possibly, any ideas as to what infection I have?
Symptoms:
1) I'm running Norton Antivirus 2006, fully updated, and when I try to bring up its Main Window, it comes up but is utterly useless. The window shows only a "snapshot" of the desktop portion that was below it. No buttons or options are visible or usable.
2) I've been getting numerous Internet Explorer pop-ups that call themselves Mozilla Firefox pop-ups. The content of the pop-ups include advertisements for programs that guard against malicious software and programs that scan computers for issues.
3) The Internet Explorer process "iexplore.exe" starts on its own constantly. This, I'm guessing, is how the pop-ups come up. I don't even use Internet Explorer. I will use the Task Manager to end the "iexplore.exe" process, but then a few minutes later it reappears, showing (or at least trying to show) a new pop-up window.
4) I ended a few unknown processes (a risky business, I know, and I don't remember which ones they were). That was the point at which the constant pop-ups stopped appearing and were replaced by the periodic pop-up error message, "The requested lookup key was not found in any active activation context."
5) The browsers I use are MSN and Firefox. MSN is now incapacitated; when I sign in and open a new window, the window is blank, and no matter what website I try to visit, it remains blank. I can still use Firefox; that's how I'm typing this message.
Any advice? Possibly, any ideas as to what infection I have?