psivius
Well-Known Member
Hi there,
I had (more than a) little run in with some spyware recently and went on a rampage to destroy all rogue processes, services and drivers that may be running in the background of my system. Initially I used an application called Starter to help with the registry application startup values and thought I was in the clear. But then I still got the "Your system in infected. Download the so and so application blah blah blah" message every so now and then. I then used an application called Security Task Manager. Brilliant program. Showed me about three hidden processes running in the background that I was completely unaware of. These hidden processes start themselves outside of the normal startup locations in the registry. Security Task Manager gives you the name of the process as well as the name of the file that started the process. I could not delete the files while windows was running as the processes were still running and I was unable to stop the processes either. I then restarted in safe mode and deleted the files. I then located all instances of the files in the registry and deleted the keys containing them. (I did have a problem with one pesky file which loaded itself in Safe Mode as well. I used an app called File Assassin to delete that file while still in Safe Mode and then removed the entries from the registry associated with that file.) I restarted my machine and now don't get any annoying messages and there are no rogue processes/services running in the background and I have to say I even notice an overall performance increase in Windows. Great stuff!
My problem now is that, very intermittently, I get an annoying 'Critical Stop' sound event. I would imagine somehow somewhere something is trying to start in the background but the file is now missing.
I would like to know if there are there any applications that can track which applications are being started in the background. I have checked the event viewer but don't see anything significant under Application or System.
I really would hate to have to re-install because of this, but it really is annoying. My heart skips a beat every time I hear that sound wondering which of the many tasks I may be running failed.
Any help would be much appreciated.
I had (more than a) little run in with some spyware recently and went on a rampage to destroy all rogue processes, services and drivers that may be running in the background of my system. Initially I used an application called Starter to help with the registry application startup values and thought I was in the clear. But then I still got the "Your system in infected. Download the so and so application blah blah blah" message every so now and then. I then used an application called Security Task Manager. Brilliant program. Showed me about three hidden processes running in the background that I was completely unaware of. These hidden processes start themselves outside of the normal startup locations in the registry. Security Task Manager gives you the name of the process as well as the name of the file that started the process. I could not delete the files while windows was running as the processes were still running and I was unable to stop the processes either. I then restarted in safe mode and deleted the files. I then located all instances of the files in the registry and deleted the keys containing them. (I did have a problem with one pesky file which loaded itself in Safe Mode as well. I used an app called File Assassin to delete that file while still in Safe Mode and then removed the entries from the registry associated with that file.) I restarted my machine and now don't get any annoying messages and there are no rogue processes/services running in the background and I have to say I even notice an overall performance increase in Windows. Great stuff!
My problem now is that, very intermittently, I get an annoying 'Critical Stop' sound event. I would imagine somehow somewhere something is trying to start in the background but the file is now missing.
I would like to know if there are there any applications that can track which applications are being started in the background. I have checked the event viewer but don't see anything significant under Application or System.
I really would hate to have to re-install because of this, but it really is annoying. My heart skips a beat every time I hear that sound wondering which of the many tasks I may be running failed.
Any help would be much appreciated.
