Sunday, February 23, 2003 - Sun, 23 Feb 2003

The AVG program ran all night. It spent 75% of its time in the Temporary Internet Files directory. That is sort of ridiculous and I’ll have to check why later. It finds the “Trojan Horse MusicSearch” in my Temporary Internet Files directory, specifically: c:WindowsTemporary Internet FilesContent.IE5DQDOFC68THE_UL~1.EXE, so I try to get AVG to “quarantine” it, but it says it cannot. I take a look, and the specified file is not there?! Maybe it’s hidden or moved or something. I go to the AVG site and then www.antivirus.com, but cannot find anything at all about MusicSearch. Then I search Google and it finds, of all things, a certain public blog where a blogger encountered this Trojan and scores of people found his page and added to his blog with their questions or thoughts on it. Interesting. It gave me some hints on a few things to try and I was able to eradicate it from my machine.

I also search the Langa List archive but nothing was there about the Trojan, so I e-mailed Fred about it. But I did reacquaint myself with Fred Langa’s cleanall.bat program, which totally cleans up the Temporary Internet Files area for you. My machine has 3 years of gunk in it. It was now about time to run his Cleanall - and guess what: over 800 MB of space was released! Then do a defrag. Now antivirus runs much faster and my machine appears to be running better (or is this just the placebo effect?)