Did I catch a virus?

[Curious Cat]

My PC was running ok until last week where it kept rebooting itself once or twice after I started it. Then my norton antivirus subscription record got corrupt (I have to reinstall it all over again). And this week it get worst. Now my outlook menu bar simply got stuck. I can't click on any of the button (I have to use shortcut key).

My norton was updated (it is on automatic liveupdate mode all these while). I have perform a full system scan and there is no trace of any virus. I had installed sygate personal firewall as well.

Could it be that I have caught a unknown virus (What is the chances of getting one)? Worst still, could it be someone had hacked inside my PC?

[Chicken]

I would say that spontaneous rebootilation is not generally a sign of a virus. Maybe a conflict of some sort or a hardware issue. Do you remember if you installed any software or hardware prior to it acting up? (I presume that at one time you didn't have problems.)

[Curious Cat]

The only thing that I installed lately is sygate personal firewall. But it was running perfectly ok for about a week.

[bear]

Not to disagree, but Sasser can cause mysterious reboots...just a thought, and may not be behind this.

[Andrew]

Originally posted by bear:

Not to disagree, but Sasser can cause mysterious reboots...just a thought, and may not be behind this.

Bear is correct - Sasser has been known to do this..

Have you downloaded and installed the patch from microsoft.com?

(I would hope and updated norton would tell you that you were infected with sasser, but you just never know)

[Curious Cat]

I'd suspect that it is Sasser. I did the ms patch and even downloaded the sasser fix. but when I scan through It detected nothing.

I guess I better get a new harddisk and re-install everything. BTW, how can I make a copy of the newly install HD, so that in case I got hit and need to re-install the HD to it original state.

[bear]

Best way I've found is Drive Image. [http://ebargainsoftware.com/driveimage.html]
Allows you to make an image of the drive, and restore later.
It can back up/image right from within Windows, so if you keep up with imaging the drive on a regular basis, you could restore to a pre-virus point fairly easily.
Good stuff.

[Andrew]

WOAW - dont go getting a new hard drive - worse case scenario - you need to reformat your hard drive - but, I dont think it needs to get to that....

Try recovering to a previously stable setting (windows feature) - choose a date prior to notticing any issues..

Once youve recovered - install all the appropriate patches - you should be ok (if its even the sasser virus to begin with) - either way - this should be able to resolve your issues...

[interactive]

A bit out there, but how do the reboots take place? Does the screen just all of a sudden go black and your motherboard runs a POST test?

If so, this could be another thing, hardware related. Maybe too many devices on a small powersupply.