Dear Zippy42,
I have a few suggestions.
1. You don't say that you have actually run Norton AntiVirus to get
rid of the trojan. If it is being detected at startup, then your
virus definitions are recent enough to solve the problem, and your
first job should be to do a full virus scan with the existing
definitions, being sure to configure the program to scan all files.
Delete any detected files. If - as it seems - you have not yet
deleted the trojan, it may well keep modifying your hosts file.
2. The clue may be in your statement that you saved the hosts file
"not as a text file". What you are trying to achieve, of course, is
that you save the amended copy back as "hosts" and *not* as
"hosts.txt". If you use File | Save As... in Notepad to save the file
and enter the name as "hosts", this will not work: instead, it will
still create a new "hosts.txt" file, which will not serve your
purpose. The simple solution is simply to use File | Save in Notepad:
this just puts the amended text back where it came from. If you want
to use File | Save As... and then change the "Save as type:" to "All
files", you need also to enter the file name as "hosts." - the
trailing full stop is necessary to prevent the "txt" extension from
being added.
3. If you have access to another PC with internet access (a friend?
at work? in an internet cafe?), you can download the Symantec
Intelligent Updater from
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/download/pages/US-N95.html
transfer it to your PC, and run it there to update your virus
definitions. It is a multi-megabyte file, but there is a version that
comes in parts, each small enough to fit on a diskette, if that helps.
This is a temporary solution, of course, but it may help you to rid
your PC of the infection and get back to normal live updates.
I trust this helps.
Carnegie |
