Dear Trevor

I do not know of any application smart enough to delete virus written registry entries and put it back to what it was before but WinXP has a facility to restore the last good entry. However, you must delete the virus before you action XP's restore facility.

Unfortunate, some viruses cannot be directly deleted out of memory so when you close down or reboot your PC the virus is re-written back to your HD. That is why, for some viruses, Trojans and worms, you have to boot up your PC in "safe mode", that way the malware is not lodged in the PCs memory but still on the hard disk.

I would just like to add one more thing, most anti-spyware apps have use similar databases of malware names and signiatures. However, sometimes it's those small differences that saves your PC from being infected with something nasty. Recently this year I found that a "keylogger" had infected my PC, of the three anti-spyware apps I have MS Anti-Spyware found and deleted this piece of rubbish. Even more recently I found "Winfixer" installed on my PC, a particularly nasty piece of spyware secretly installed when I upgraded my Divx media player from version 5 to 6, spybot found and deleted this hidden nasty. And, as you know, Ad-Aware regularly finds and deletes spyware/adware cookies.

The point I am making is this, at the moment no one anti-spyware app can cover all the dangers that are out there, that is why I use three of them and may also use "Malwarewipe" in the near future.




UK Bob