Might as well tell the story from the beginning.
A couple days ago I was visting a webcomic site. I have a few favourites and I tend to check them daily. Teatimer from Spybot S&D piped up with a warning. It had something to do with "flash32" and the registry. I didn't know what it was so I hit "denied" . Today the problems started. I noticed that the computer was getting a bit unstable, games would behave strangely. My music player would sometimes hiss and pop for no reason I could find.
And then firefox crashed on me. This wass the first crash I ever had from firefox since my last install of windows. I pulled up Spybot S&D, updated and did a full scan. It picked up 2 entriedsoth Virtumonde.sci However it did not pick them up properly. Instead there was an error message beside each, something about a list and it being truncated or a similar problem. My first act was to search on the web to learn what this was. Firefox then started to repeatedly crash. MY next act was to plug in a USB stick and backup the saves of a game I was playing recently.
Before I could even remove the USB stick my computer crashed. BSOD, PFN List Corrupt. When the computer booted up it loaded windows, but now my keyboard and mouse are no longer recognized. They do not even recieve power from the computer. I then tried to load up safe mode. The first attempt seemed to stall and then the computer reset. The second attempt suceeded in getting into safe mode. THe mouse and keyboard worked perfectly in safe mode.
The first thing I did was plug in the USB stick to see if the saves were intact, they seemed to be fine. I immediatly yanked out the USB drive. Windows then popped up with a message that a file write operation to Drive :F had failed. This made my blood run cold, this drive has all my backups on it and something on the computer was trying to write to it! Maybe it already had, I have no way of knowing. I loaded up system restore and restored the computer to a save point I had made several days ago. The system restored without incident, but when I loaded up windows my keyboard and mouse still do not function.
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I can't even begin to express how stressed out I am over this problem. I have no idea where to even begin fixing it, or if it is possible at all. If anyone can help me answer these questions your aid would be very appreciated:
- How can I recover keyboard and mouse support outside of safe mode?
- How do I get rid of Virtumonde.sci?
- Is there any possible hope of bringing my computer back to a working state?
- Would it be safe to recover files such as music and other savegames from the hard drives. Or should they be considered wholly tainted and deleted as a whole?
- Is my backup USB stick now unsafe to use?
- What can I do to make my computer as bulletproof as possibly so this doesn't happen again?