by James Climer
3. February 2010 06:25
Viruses tore through my home network over the holidays and left me frustrated to no end. The following is the process I used to remove the viruses and get the computers working again.
Background:
I have Windows XP Professional sp3 on two of the computers and Vista on another. They were all infected. The solution below is for the Windows XP Professional sp3 computers.
Solution:
- I installed Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) (http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/). This found a lot of viruses, trojans and such and removed everyone that it found. But I was still getting pop-up ads for virus removal tools. My system was in too bad shape for MSE to correct it.
- Next, I installed Malwarebytes (http://www.malwarebytes.org/) and ran it. It found a few more corrupt files and found a lot garbage in the registry. To clean up the mess left behind by the virus, it removed a lot of files and settings from the registry. One of which, was a modified windows update setting. So windows update no longer worked, and MSE wouldn't update it's virus database either.
I searched around for solutions for this and found a lot of dead-end forums saying pretty much to reregister dlls. So I created a batch file containing the following:
REGSVR32 WUPS2.DLL /S
REGSVR32 WUPS.DLL /S
REGSVR32 WUAUENG.DLL /S
REGSVR32 WUAPI.DLL /S
REGSVR32 MUCLTUI.DLL /S
REGSVR32 WUCLTUI.DLL /S
REGSVR32 WUWEB.DLL /S
REGSVR32 MUWEB.DLL /S
REGSVR32 QMGR.DLL /S
REGSVR32 QMGRPRXY.DLL /S
And executed it. All of the lines worked except for the bold one above. And the windows update still didn't work. I still got the error 0x8024D007 when I tried to reinstall Windows Update or download an update and the error I got when trying to correct the registry was:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\wuaueng.dll". Error 0x80070005: Access is denied
I ran it with a check in the box for "Fix Windows Update" and it went to work. However, at some point in the middle of the job it started getting errors, basically saying access is denied to wuaueng.dll and to run Repair Permissions. So I did.
-
In the Dial-a-fix application, I selected the "Tools" button (little hammer icon) on the bottom. I then scrolled down to "Repair Permissions" and ran that. It took about 5 to 10 minutes to run.
- After it completed, I ran Dial-a-fix again with a check in the box for Wu/Wuau / Fix Windows Update.
- After that I was able to go to microsoft's update site, reinstall windows update, and get the latest updates for the OS as well as the latest virus definitions for MSE.
This was not a fun process, but I hope this helps people dealing with the same issues.
Just to note: I plan to reload my computers anyway because there is no telling what else doesn't work properly, but at least I'm able to back up the machines before reloading them.
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