Now I needed to solve a little problem with my girlfriends computer. Her laptop was infected by the so called XP Antivirus 2008 malware/virus and it was a real pain in the ass to remove!

It also was a real pain to find a proper solution to remove the virus and hijacking software, almost every solution I found online seemed not to be working and after every reboot her antivirus software found new threats.

The Antivirus 2008 XP Virus works as follows;

• it replaces your desktop background with an image that your computer is infected
• it replaces your screensaver
• it disables the possibilities to change your background/screensaver etc.
• it gives you popups / warnings that your computer is infected and that you can buy the software to clean your computer
• you need to enter your creditcard information and credentials to continue, and of course, this is where you get scammed.
• Also, her browser was hijacked, it only affected IE/Chrome and not Mozilla Firefox, although a lot of webpages (hotmail f.e. ) were crippled.

I was able to remove the virus and all side effects using AVG Free and Spybot Search & Destroy.

Still the browser hijack remained! and in the background there were some processes running, the browser was still hijacked and search engine results were redirected to really ugly and non useful affiliate websites.

I tried everything from safeboot, manually removing strange files, while looking at network traffic using the commandline command ‘netstat -B’ to determine which programs were issuing internet requests.  Even SmitFraudFix, which was set to solve this problem, wasn’t able to fix it!

A better Google search led me to this Yahoo Answers thread where the same question was raised and it provided the ONLY workable solution using the Malware Bytes Anti-Malware software. This software package really solved the problem and I can recommend it to all of you being infected by this hijacking and malware software XP Antivirus 2008.