w32 element trojan

[po_weber]

Hello to all
I'm new here so hope I am posting this in the right spot.

I recently have had problems with Win XP Home freezing and shutting down on me, and it got to the stage where Windows didnt start.

I was finally able to run check disk, and then Avast anti virus which didn't detect anything, however when I ran spybot it came up with w32 element trojan worm as part of a desktop shortcut to a Shockwave game Zuma.

After allowing Spybot to remove the shortcut, I created a new shortcut and when I ran Spybot the Trojan was back, so again I allowed it to be fixed and did not create a new shortcut.

The next time I ran Spybot the Trojan was attached itself to the Spybot shortcut on the desktop and so I allowed SpyBot to remove the shortcut. After all this I re-ran Spybot to find it had attacked a different shortcut.

I dont know if this was the cause of the windows problem as xp is now running ok most of the time but I am unable to get rid of this Element Trojan.


So far I have run the following pieces of software, and the only program that detects anything is Spybot.

* Avast
* Avg
* Norton online scan
* MacFee online scan
* Ad-aware
* Ewido
* Spyware Doctor

One final thing is that I ran Zuma over the network on a laptop that wasn't doing anything strange and it started doing strange things so I'm left wondering if the software developers have planted a trojan/spyware in their application for some unknown purpose.

I am hoping someone may be able to tell me if I have a problem or not. If I do have a problem how can I fix it, as this is driving me nuts and any help would be greatly appreciated.