Hi,

After years of using PortableApps, kids using USB sticks, and now their gaming activities, mixed with my lack of knowledge in keeping things running well, I've got 3 messed up computers. My husband had installed BitDefender on all three, but it's now clear some damaging things got in. They are all very slow, poor screen refresh, some crashes, and very slow internet access.

Before discovering SpyBot, (and thinking BitDefender was taking care of viruses) I purchased RegZooka (came with SpyZooka) and who knows what it did to things. SpyZooka kept finding viruses (some the same ones) even after repeat consecutive runs. One was a trojan in the BitDefender folder and I followed some web process for manually removing it (took a SafeMode scan to find it), but still had the same performance problems.

In my effort to run my software and get my late taxes done (still not done), and during 2 weeks of horrible "support" from BitDefender, I repeatedly ran the RegZooka and opened up my Task Manager and randomly removed processes (mostly Chrome) that seemed to be eating up my memory. It helped, but after about an hour of leaving the computer on (computer #2) everything's hosed again.

So, I'm able to run Firefox on computer #1 (where I am now), and have some stability, so I removed BitDefender, RegZooka & SpyZooka, and installed Malwarebytes. It didn't find anything! So, I've now followed your "BEFORE You Post" directions and run ERUNT, SpyBot, and dds.scr on computer #1 (first backed up data & set a system restore point). I have several questions.

1. SpyBot found & cleared 71 tracking cookies. Could this alone explain the slowdowns? After a reboot, my task manager showed PF Usage of 1.0 GB with no applications running. Is this normal? I'm running Windows XP Professional V. 2002 Service Pack 3. Intel Core 2 CPU, 6320 @ 1.86GHz, 1.98 GB of RAM.

2. My external drive was connected during the scan, but I couldn't find a way to include it in the settings. Would it have been scanned? If not, how do I do that (along with all our USB sticks)?

3. Is there a way to restore or recover from any damage I've done by messing with my registries? What other tools should I use to diagnose and in what order? Would it be worthwhile to run SpyBot again in safe mode?

4. I'm getting ready to follow your procedures on my 2nd computer, but it's too slow to easily do a backup (would likely take days). How important is this? Can you recommend a good application for incremental backups that work well with various external drives?

Please forgive my relative lack of technical knowledge. Reading through the various forum posts often sounds like Greek to me. I'm an educator and am needing to get everything in order technically so I can start a blog for homeschooled children, in part to help them navigate through this stuff so they don't fall prey to bad advice as I've had. I appreciate any advice or support you can offer me. I did keep some of the early logs that showed what trojans had been found, if that's useful.

Thank You,
KiwiKay