What is the windows file qwhgwol.exe for ?

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Clarification of Question by djp-ga on 17 Jan 2004 09:57 PST

The reason I ask is that I deleted it when virus checker found a virus
attached to it - now none of my applications (apart from IE) will
open.

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Request for Question Clarification by aditya2k-ga on 17 Jan 2004 10:35 PST

I really doubt this is a Windows file. It is possible you might have
misspelled it. Do you remember which folder this file was in? It is
possible that it is a custom written file.

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Request for Question Clarification by livioflores-ga on 17 Jan 2004 20:12 PST

Please tell us wich version of windows are you running.

Thank you.

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Clarification of Question by djp-ga on 18 Jan 2004 01:09 PST

The machine I have the problem on is running Windows 98.  It looks
with some investigation as though a virus has attacked the machine
forcing every application to run this application first (I have
checked three other 98 machines and none have this file on them).  I
also found references to it in a batch file OEMCOMPUTER.BAT.

I had a similar problem though not with the same file.My problem was
that the PATH variable was cleaned out.Check if that is the case for
you as well.

Also try running applications (which do not run) from the command line.
You might get some clues.

Also some general advise...
check out http://www.systeminternals.com/, it has lots of useful
debugging tools like process explorer, registry explorer etc  ...

Where would I check the PATH variable. I am able to run applications
if I open a file from them i.e. a Word Doc, .eml message, money file
etc.

Hi djp,

Regarding your question:
What is the windows file qwhgwol.exe for ?

Judging by your comments, I think we both agree that the file is
probably a virus.   There are plenty of viruses that use random file
names for their executable portion. If your machine is in a corporate
environment, you should get your machine restored by your system
adminstrator. If not, you should attempt to remove the virus yourself.

Modern anti-virus software such as Norton and McAfee come with a
bootable CD that offers system rcovery and virus cleaning. If you own
such software, try to both from the CD and follow the instructions to
clean the virus. If not, then proceed as:

1. Use the Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) to kill any running instances of qwhgwol.exe
2. Remove any references to qwhgwol.exe from your startup folder,
registry startup, win.ini, autoexec.bat etc.
3. Rename the file to qwhgwol.exe.bak
4. Restart your computer

The offending file should no longer load. Then check all the regular
applications you run to check everything is in working order. Be
warned that, there is always the possibility that the file is NOT a
virus, but a driver or something. Driver files often have very cryptic
names; it is possible that this is the driver for some special
hardware attached to your computer.

If everything is working fine, you can copy the file to some other
location for future reference.