Long story short, I decided to go Full S&D Professional after noticing some suspect activity on my Windows 10 system (more or less constant HDD activity on C:), which still is ongoing at this after running several scans and some careful cleanup with system repair. I also uninstalled some old apps no longer used, and I have also tried, without success, to trace what's going on with Task Manager. I'm note sure what has caused it, but today when I tried to open my VB6 environment (I'm a VB6 developer) I was met with this:

vb6doesntstart.png

and then it died when clicking OK button.

I don't know why VB6 asks for that file as it's nothing I'm using, but possibly it's some old legacy it's setup to load. This made me open Regedit to make a search for DAO350.DLL and found several item, which confirmed the file didn't exist where Windows supposedly expected it to be (Program Files(x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\DAO\), but when I looked closer on the registry keys I saw this:

regdao1.png

and this:

regdao2.png

and that sure looks suspect to me. In fact, I found several "InprocServer32" keys with those suspect items, not only for DAO350/DAO.DBEngine.35 - but what is it? Is it a virus/trojan or other malware that S&D missed to detect, or something legit?

I also ran a Rootkit scan, where the quick scan showed ether "No hidden files detected, No hidden entries detected or No hidden processes detected" for all items. When I run a "Deep scan" it displays about 10 registry keys with "No admin in ACL" and a length list of file item with "Unkown ADS" in details. Most of the files are in "C;\Windows\Installer\$PatchCache$\Managed"

Anyone has any insight on this?

TIA