think my computer has a virus but scan shows nothing (long)

[Michaelson]

I'm okay with computers but don't really understand them. As such, some of the details below might be completely irrelavent, I just include them because I'm not sure. I appologise for the long description, though.

For the past few days every now and then my party poker client has been having connection issues, which isn't something I'd usually be surprised about except that from asking on the tables and the forum I seemed to be the only one experiencing them.

Today I went to fire up the tables and noticed that I was having connection problems from the get go, so I shut down the client and restarted the computer in the hope that would fix the problem. When the computer restarted I noticed a warning message above the startbar flash up and dissapear very quickly, which I later discovered was telling me the firewall had been turned off.


So that doesn't bode well, right? I ran the AVG virus scanner and took a while to figure out how to operate the firewall and block all traffic (at this point I didn't know what the popup said). Anyway, the virus scan shows up nothing.

I then go through the firewall settings and blocked access to every program I didn't recognise (except for a few I thought looked legit: "Dr Watson something-or-other" is the only one of these I remember and wasn't quite sure about).

With the firewall blocking all traffic I restart the computer and the message pops up again. I go to the firewall and it is allowing all traffic. I blocked all traffic again and turned the computer off.

Now I am here on my laptop.

What should I do from here? I only have the AVG anti-virus software and firewall (I have a registered version). I can install other scanners from disks, though, and that was to be my next step. Are there any other specific steps anyone can recommend, though? And is there anything I should make sure I do as soon as I turn the computer back on?

I should probably add that I'm usually pretty careful about accessing the internet and I reformatted my machine only a few weeks ago, so I'm not sure how my machine might have been compromised. The only software I run that I am skeptical of is a certain method of accessing media of which discussion here is forbidden. I also recently installed a bunch of party poker add ons, but they are all vouched for in the Software forum's FAQ. I downloaded these after I experienced lag on the party poker software, though.

I was also playing yesterday and a player "accidently" typed a very dodgy-looking url to a .rar file into the chatbox. I wasn't game to open it, but I did go to the root menu which appeared non-malicious. Another player on the table said it related to bot software. When I posted it in the SSNL party regulars thread no one responded and said anything about viruses. The url below:

Disclaimer: I have no idea about the contents of this link and post it precisely because it looks dodgy

home.arcor.de/undertroop/PartyPoker_MoneyMaker_v2.1.rar

[im_not_1337]

Uhm yeah def edit your post and take out that link. I'm almost positive linking to potential malware is against this forums rules and its not a bright idea anyway as it will likely infect many people.

The link didn't work for me and its really hard to tell if you have anything from your description. If you want my honest opinion, it sounds like you are being paranoid and were just having a problem with your av/firewall.

If you want to be sure, get a secondary opinion with Kaspersky's online virus scanner and post the results here. Also, if you want us to check manually and see if anything looks suspicious, download hijackthis and post your log here.