It all started last Tuesday when, while attempting to play happy music over Windows Media Player for the bunnies, I could hear commercials playing in the background even though no Internet Explorer connections were active. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that we had picked up a virus somewhere, but was was disconcerting to me was that, not only did we have McAfee Anti-Virus running on our machine, but a scan of the machine resulted in zero viruses being detected.

So I did what I always did in these kinds of circumstances: I downloaded trusty old Malwarebytes to my machine and cranked up a full machine scan. Not only did it find two trojans affecting some files called svchost.exe, but we started getting these informatory balloons from Malwarebytes saying it had successfully blocked access to a “potentially malicious” website being attempted by – you guessed it – svchost.exe. I then attempted to restore our machine back a couple of days later, only to find out that, not only would System Restore not work, but Windows Update was failing as well. Not a good thing, to say the least!

Unfortunately, Malwarebytes, while successfully quarantining the trojans, seemed unable to get rid of them. Oh sure, it quarantined them and allowed you to delete them, but upon reboot there they were again. I was just about ready to spend some serious dinero by calling Geek Squad when I happened upon a Microsoft chat room recommending trying Microsoft Security Essentials, a product I had never heard of before. Now I’m amongst the most skeptical when it comes to Microsoft products, but I’m here to tell you that after the better part of two days running a combination of virus scans by Windows Essentials and Windows Offline Detector with Malwarebytes in tandem I finally got rid of the two svchost.exe viruses. Security Essentials even detected a virus (on our boot drive, no less!) that was preventing Windows Update (and, I’m guessing, System Restore as well) from running successfully.

What I’m really pi**ed at is McAfee AntiVirus – not only did they serve in the de facto role of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, saying everything’s fine while our economy melts down around us by whistling happily past the graveyard as some really malicious sh*t was allowed to infect our computer, but my parents were having issues with their machine, and running Malwarebytes against their so-called “McAfee protected” PC yielded 46 – count ’em, 46! – malicious items. Fortuntely, I was able to capture some screen shots from their machine before Malwarebytes took care of those, and when I call McAfee on Monday they’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do!

I’ve deinstalled McAfee from our machine and will try running with a combination of Security Essentials and Malwarebytes for a while to see how that goes. Both definitely came through in my time of need, and I’ve always believed supporting software products and vendors that are there for you.