S
Sam Shasteen
I got some cryptominer virus and Avast discovered it and 'dealt with it' with moderate success but I'm still having lingering issues from it. My CPU/GPU are no longer pegged at 100% but I'm unable to access my desktop/taskbar at all. The screen is 100% black with only minimized showing in the bottom righthand corner, they look like old school windows minimized programs with just being a tiny rectangle with the minimize/maximize/close icons being shown inside of it.
I first noticed something was wrong with my computer when a couple of command prompt windows would open at startup, they would then minimize and auto-close to no doubt hide whatever scripts they were running. It would also simultaneously black-out the desktop for about 30 seconds and then the desktop would appear like normal. Next time I restarted Avast got rid of some of it but the command prompts were still opening at startup and I couldn't even run command prompt myself, even with privileges, it would just auto-close. There was a script entry in the registry for cmd's autorun that was doing all of it, I cleared the data and was able to access cmd normally. It was pointing to some file called 'soundmodule.exe', no doubt the malware that I'm guessing Avast removed because I cannot find it on my system.
I think that by deleting the entry and Avast removing the virus there is some script from the virus somewhere that is not running correctly (probably pointing to a file/script that no longer exists) so my desktop is not restored. On startup the cmd now opens and just sits there on top of the black 'desktop' without even trying to run anything. To even get Chrome open to type this I had to go into the task manager and manually locate/run the Chrome program.
Another problem, although I doubt it would help with this anyway, is that Windows Defender was disabled and I cannot access it through Settings. I've ran through Avast/AVG/CCcleaner.McAfee and none of them detect any issues at all. I can't even bring up the taskbar with the Windows key. I tried to windows+tab to create a new desktop instance but nothing comes up there either.
Continue reading...
I first noticed something was wrong with my computer when a couple of command prompt windows would open at startup, they would then minimize and auto-close to no doubt hide whatever scripts they were running. It would also simultaneously black-out the desktop for about 30 seconds and then the desktop would appear like normal. Next time I restarted Avast got rid of some of it but the command prompts were still opening at startup and I couldn't even run command prompt myself, even with privileges, it would just auto-close. There was a script entry in the registry for cmd's autorun that was doing all of it, I cleared the data and was able to access cmd normally. It was pointing to some file called 'soundmodule.exe', no doubt the malware that I'm guessing Avast removed because I cannot find it on my system.
I think that by deleting the entry and Avast removing the virus there is some script from the virus somewhere that is not running correctly (probably pointing to a file/script that no longer exists) so my desktop is not restored. On startup the cmd now opens and just sits there on top of the black 'desktop' without even trying to run anything. To even get Chrome open to type this I had to go into the task manager and manually locate/run the Chrome program.
Another problem, although I doubt it would help with this anyway, is that Windows Defender was disabled and I cannot access it through Settings. I've ran through Avast/AVG/CCcleaner.McAfee and none of them detect any issues at all. I can't even bring up the taskbar with the Windows key. I tried to windows+tab to create a new desktop instance but nothing comes up there either.
Continue reading...