Hmm, seems that my brother has been infected with malware to the extent that some of this crap can't be removed with Spybot nor even Adaware PE

The other annoying thing is that I can't install any of the latest security patches for the OS, XP Home as when I attempt to install them the machine spontaneously reboots to keep this from happening.

Perhaps there is a rootkit installed as well, guess I need to find out what is happening and post more comments on what I've found....

Have you tried booting from Linux on CD (I use puppy Linux)and scanning for viruses online using Trend Micro Housecall?

This would prevent the viruses from loading and blocking your ability to remove them.

Chris

Thanks but no I had not thought about that, but I will make note of this for future reference as there are a number of Linux distros setup for just this purpose

I did find a couple more trojans on his box but I asked if I could just copy all his data over to his external drive and reformat and start from scratch once more. So this is what I ended up doing, however, this time I d/l the free versions of AVG Anti-Spyware/Virus for him as well as having AdAware PE/Spybot/Windows Defender on there too.

Man this sounds more like a cocktail for a computer with AIDS now