[Thinkpad] OT: My viral experience

First, many thanks to all who wrote (in capitals or not). And I'm
doubly stupid because I remember reading everyone's advice about never
clicking an email with an exe file.

In any case, here's how I got clean, because it may prove instructive:

1. I did what Deanna said, and renamed my address book files.
2. I went to Symantec and ran their virus scan. We went out to dinner
and a play (Tony Kusher's Homebody/Kabul here in LA. AVOID IT AT ALL
COSTS.) and came back 6 hours later. The scan had looked at 43,097
files, and found two to be infected. But it seemed to be still
scanning. It assured me I would get a complete analysis when it
finished. There was a tiny sliver of white in the Progress thermometer,
but Jeez. Six hours? My hard drive light only occasionally was
flickering, and the file being scanned, and that number of files
examined, just didn't budge. I hit Help, to see if they talked about
that. And the whole scan window disappeared. Not minimized; gone. It
was as though the scan had never taken place. (There was also an
annoying little toolbar of save/print/compose/etc. icons which did
nothing useful. I hit Save, thinking it would give me a file of info
about the infections. It saved a GIF picture of the scan illustration.)

3. So, even though I'd gone to Symantec's virus cure page (with the two
columns of fixes, alphabetically and chronologically), I didn't know
which one to use. The scan hadn't (yet) told me what I had.
4. I was prepared to run the whole thing again, overnight. Then I
remembered...
5. GoBack, which I"d used once before. I copied the work I'd done today
(ie, Sun.) on three files in Word, to a floppy, copied a couple recent
emails, and sent the sumbitch back to midnight of Saturday--before the
accursed "Microsoft" email w/ the virus ever arrived.
6. It worked. The window demanding all my email info hasn't
reappeared. I think I"m okay.

Apologies to anyone whom I may have infected. I did act as soon as I
got your warnings, and stayed offline during the six hours (the scan
program had downloaded and ran offline.)

I'm peeved at Symantec, though, for such an iffy procedure. It's nice
that it's free, etc., but maybe it needs tweaking. I'll never know if
it was completing the scan, or just stuck prior to completion and not
getting there.

I'm keeping Justin's and Deanna's emails with their suggestions as to
which virus it is, so if it starts acting up, I'll run those cures.

And now back to actual ThinkPad matters. Thanks again to all.

Ellis Weiner

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Received on Mon Sep 29 03:31:57 2003