VLC, Media Player classic GONE?! ~VIRUS?~

[Roquefort]

Hi,

k, well I have a small problem. I had media player class installed on my pc for movies and what not, and the other day when I tried to open it, "searching for icon", surely enough when I went to the folder it was gone. So I installed VLC and a day later same thing happened.

This only seems to be happening with my movie programs, although wmp still works but I dont have codecs.

Another problem is that now when I go to my movies in my hdd they are all have the unknown file icon, and within seconds of opening the folder explorer crashes.

I can still open some videos if I browse to the location using wmp, then explorer doesnt crash.

Is this some kinda virus or spyware thingy?
oh and I'm using AVG 8 Free edition and spybot search and destroy.

Thanks in advance.

 

[charlie_82]

Do you still see media player classic & vlc when you go to your Program Files folder? Are the exe's still there?

 

[Roquefort]

ye in program files the exes are still there (but they are the "i dont know where the exe is" exe) but in the install directory they are not.

The strangest thing is that this is only affecting my movie/music players?!

 

[genetic]

Sounds like you have corrupt codecs which use DirectShow, which in turn can cause explorer to crash.

Try downloading this codec:

http://www.free-codecs.com/FFDShow_download.htm

 

[cerebus]

Actually I had a very similar problem recently and it turned out that I had been pretty badly infected with a virus. I had to reinstall Windows fresh. But all the things you're saying sound pretty familiar, VLC disappearing/malfunctioning like that. What antivirus do you have? I personally found that Norton/AVG didn't pick anything up but when I put Kaspersky on it picked up a whole batch of trojans. Well I learned my lessons about the internet the hard way.

 

[Roquefort]

oh and I'm using AVG 8 Free edition and spybot search and destroy.

hmm ill look into this kaspersky, which is better tho:
bitdefender
nod 32
kaspersky
?

thanks

 

[cerebus]

They are all good at particular things. I find Kaspersky is the best at locating trojans. But any of those should work. You should read around to find what suits you best. I have to say even though Kaspersky is best for finding trojans, it's much more intrusive into my system than I would like. I don't appreciate the way it injects itself into processes.