norton pop up

[Layni]

My friend brought over a piece of paper today that her norton antivirus thing keeps popping up on her pc everytime she clicks on a new screen- so i told her i would ask since i have no clue what the hell this means-

scan type: realtime protection scan
event: virus found
virus name: downloader
file: c:\program files\common files\?ystem
computer: SALLY
user: sally
action taken: clean failed: quarantine failed: access denied
date found: sat jul 06 2353 2007

I told her to write it down and let me see it rather than send it to me- dont want to infect anything of mine, so please let me know so i can tell her what to do.
Thanks

[Layni]

just got a call from sal- she said her husband got on the computer- same one different user thingy- she said when he got on -right away it had that thing came up but said it quarantined it- so does that mean on her user name, guess what she wants to know is if one username can have a virus unquarantined and not the others- or something like that?

[Morty]

Well, yes and no.

When HE logged in, Norton could have snipped the bastard and all is well.
Or, the virus has more than one copy of itself. And even then, Norton should have nipped it.

My guess the virus created its own "instruction" and it was looking for her everytime since she was the initial infection and that's how Norton was able to nab it when he logged in.

I'd download AVG and run that too. Besides running a full system scan with Norton again. Reboot, then run it again. Odds are its gone.

But with the AVG, just disable, not delete, norton and run AVG. Do a full system scan. See if it finds anything.

Might not be a bad idea too to run Lavasoft's AdAware on full system scan and delete EVERYTHING it finds. Because the virus may be gone, but it might have left some marketing bullshit behind that may make it easier to infect again.

[Layni]

So just tell them to download AVG- disable norton and run it then do a full system scan- and run lavasoft adaware on full system scan and delete everything it finds- ok so he can find the downloads if he types in AVG & Lavasoft Adaware right?