System Repair Virus

[Gary Shepherd]

Wiz, have you seen the System Repair Virus? Know of a removal tool for it?

I'm not sure how I got this one but it tricked me up pretty good. I was working on my Windows 7 system and got a popup about "Delay Write Fail" or something like that. I've seen this error before and I'm thinking, "OK, I have a hard drive that's about to fail."

Then my system reboots, and I'm thinking that it's looking pretty serious. When Win7 starts back up, all my desktop icons are gone and have been replaced by a nice Microsofty-looking icon called System Repair. So I run it. It "scans" my computer and finds a few errors.

But I've seen this kind of scam before. The next trick is to ask me to buy the "pro" version or some crap like that to fix the problem when the problem is actually the virus that's telling me to upgrade.

Anyhow, I'll probably just reinstall Windows from my backup image but I thought you might have some insight on it first.

By the way, the desktop icons have been changed to "hidden" and so have all the files in several of my other directories. Backups, my Internet downloads folder where I keep all the cool stuff I find online, and several other folders have all been changed to "hidden". Easy to fix but irritating.