how windows 7 (inadvertently) helped me find a virus

so the other day, i got a notification in my systray that msdt.exe was corrupt, and possibly i should do a chkdsk to repair the problem. after seeing this crop up several times, i decided to take the message’s advice.  i stopped paying attention at some point, when i realized the chkdsk was gonna take a while, but glanced up and saw that it started “recovering orphaned files”.  if you’ve never had the pleasure of experiencing this phenomenon, it’s when the windows chkdsk says “hey, what’s that?  hmm, i’m not sure so i’m going to make it a totally unusable .chk file and name it something like, uh, found000087.chk.”  in theory, you could go through all your orphaned files and do something with them if you had any idea what they were after they’d been “recovered.”  i rolled my eyes and was just thankful that most of the original filenames (at least what was displayed on the screen) ended in .tmp.

so after it was done and booted up, i still got the message, but now i was graced with some errors from yahoo messenger and z-engine that my .net framework version 2.0 was jacked.  trying (vainly) to fix this by repairing and/or reinstalling .net 2.0 only revealed that “that is already part of your operating system.”  uh, yeah, but i want to reinstall it.  “if you want to install this program, run install.exe.”  okay, i thought that’s what i did…”i’m sorry, there is no file or folder named ‘install.exe’” etc., etc., etc.  i eventually gave up when i realized that both yahoo and z-engine were working anyway, which led me to deal with this other problem, the one with the corruption in “msdt.exe.” so i googled it, and lo and behold, it’s a trap virus.  which is weird because AVG never picked it up.  

so, currently i’m trying to deal with removing a virus that my virus scanner won’t detect which is, you know, fun.


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