I've got AVG and it works well for me.

I also have "I don't click on random links or popups."

worse yet....cg has Vista and u know Vista takes you thru a zillion pop ups for premission so I am wondering if she thought that this was one thing that she needed to allow?

I've cleaned this thing off of 5 PCs so far, all with McAfee. It disables McAfee so it doesn't stop it. My daughter has gotten it twice on my laptop and once on her desktop while surfing either My Yearbook or MySpace. I have banned her from my laptop. It's a real biotch to clean too. I do this for a living and have spent hours manually removing that thing from PCs. I hate it. Hate it! She had that one box pop up asking if you want to install or cancel (the second time it got my laptop) and I just shut off the laptop (hard reboot, not using ShutDown), hoping that it wasn't saved to the registry yet but it was. UGH!!!!!!!! I hate that virus. It makes me miserable and it is the most difficult one I've ever had to remove.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. (Unfortunately this bit of wisdom is coming too late for you, CG.)

I've been happy with McAfee and Ad-Aware (which reminds me, I need to put Ad-Aware on my new laptop). Once your computer is infected, cleaning it off can be a major PITA. The "Anti Virus 2009" virus has been out for a few months, though - I'm surprised the AV programs haven't addressed it adequately.

As for Vista... I cannot stand all those "allow/deny" pop-ups. I can't even do an ipconfig release/renew from the command line without my machine whining that I'm not an administrator. If I get one more pop-up I'm putting Linux on this thing.

In my experience, the virus disables McAfee before McAfee knows what's going on. It truly is making me crazy. It registers a dll and a handle and associates them with winlogon.exe and explorer.exe. You can't rename them or delete them because they are always in use, even in safe mode. When you delete their registry keys, the virus re-creates them immediately. Truly maddening. Now, I boot with a floppy boot disk and delete them through DOS. You can use process explorer to stop the handle association and then rename the files also, but until you've removed the handle association, it just keeps coming back.

Ditto. Malwarebytes Anti-malware is my new love. It got this virus off my father's computer, and got another VERY nasty one off of mine. It's free, its easy and doesn't take too long.

That happened with this computer when I had Norton. Sometimes Norton wouldn't load, which meant nothing else would work (like Internet Explorer would never open, etc). So I got McAfee. At first everything was cool, but for the past few months my computer has been sooooooooooooo slow. I thought it was adware/spyware (although McAfee doesn't find anything), but maybe it is McAfee. Thanks for the info DS.

ICK. That's nasty. What kind of sick puppies come up with this stuff?

Oh no, I have a feeling she bought it and wrecked her computer

she's good...I just got a PM....Dell took care of her and fixed it.

You guys, today has been the biggest nightmare ever. This morning somewhere around 2 or 3am, I was posting on GC and the whole time, after I clicked on the Anti Virus 2009 thingie, it just kept popping up. It kept giving me a message attached to it that said this:

"Windows security center reports that Anti Virus 2009 is inactive. Anti Virus 2009 helps to protect your computer against viruses and other security threats. Click here for suggested action. Your system might be at risk now."

I wrote this down before I went to school and tried to post it here, but I really had to go. When I got to school I asked a classmate about it, and he said don't do it. I told him I already clicked on it. He asked me if I entered my cc#. I said not yet. He said don't. He told me my computer was infected with a virus. The whole time I was in class I couldn't even hear what the instructor was saying. I was that worried. I just couldn't stay, so I left early and called Dell. I stayed on the phone with the guy for about 2 hours then we disconnected and talked via chat. When I first called, I told him what the problem was and as soon as I said Anti Virus 2009 he said uh oh. He told me everything. You guys, I didn't even know what spyware was until today. I knew what a virus was but not spyware. I asked him how it got there, and he said I either clicked on an infected site or infected e-mail. I told him I couldn't see how, because the only sites I go to are greekchat, and some of the prairie dog sites. And with the prairie dog sites, I was signing onto those when the ban was lifted, and that was on my old laptop and nothing ever happened like this. He told me it could have been any one of those sites I clicked on. I've actually learned more about computers in 3 hours than I've done my whole life. I ordered a Norton anti virus CD. He said the anti virus I had, expired. My mom bought my laptop for me to use for school, but she only got the free 30 day trial. The Dell guy told me Norton was the best one. He said that's what he uses. So I got that one. I had to pay for everything, and it was kind of a lot but at least it got fixed. They said issues like this weren't covered when the computer was purchased.

I will never, ever do that again.

I'm going back to read the comments you guys posted. I just wanted to post this.

The registry keys will keep re-creating themselves too. I tried changing values then changing the permissions on the keys to stop that and it just made a new registry key or changed it all back to how it was originally, even when I denied access to the registry key to EVERYBODY and the system account. I swear I was ready to kill that kid of mine.

I'm glad to hear you were able to recover your system and get back online. That Norton comment was very interesting - my brand new Dell laptop shipped with McAfee...

YEOW. That's really evil. I hope karma delivers a nasty bite in the posterior to whoever came up with this virus.

I had a feeling that might have been the problem when you said you had virus protection, but you were still getting messages. I hate those free trials that come with the new computer! They expire so quick it's not even worth it.

Glad you got everything fixed though!

I had a similar problem recently. I don't think it was this virus but it was something. I kept getting pop ups (not anything related to viruses), and then I would get a little notification in the corner coming from McAfee saying I wasn't fully protected. I would open up McAfee and clicked the button that said "Fix" but within a few minutes something would shut it off again.

Somehow I was able to get the virus scan running before it shut off again. I also ran Ad-Aware right after, and one of the two got the virus. It was a close one!

I just started getting the AntiVirus 2009 pop ups about 2 weeks ago too. I have McAfee..well I did anyways..im guessing AV2009 turns it off. My boyfriend got it on his laptop too!! Luckily he has a portable hardrive that he takes off his important stuff and totally reboot his system. He did it to my laptop a month ago when porn links kept installing themselves:mad:

So now I have AV2009 popping up 24/7 AND this new thing called Spyware Guard 2008. I have no idea what it is but now that thing pops up where than AV2009!!! Right now I have 3 pop up ads and a popup from Spyware Guard 2008 minimized. 'Guard' my ASS!

Anyone else have a problem with the Spyware Guard thing?