Friend with a virus

[UnknownLegend 5480]

Greetings everyone,

I have been trying to help a friend who is studying abroad currently for the last several days with a virus problem. No idea how she got it, but it's slowing down her computer and is opening up a lot of popup windows. She's attempted using two different antivirus programs-- one that was installed before she got infected(Some Symnatec Antivirus program provided by our school), and then another one(Avira AntiVir) which I sent to her via rapidshare (She couldnt download it directly from the site, Firefox shut down as soon as she tried). Spybot Search and Destroy and Ad-Aware also shut down immediately. I also tried to get her to run HijackThis, but the program freezes during the scan and a log is not created. I've also tried getting her to boot in safe mode to try scanning there, but every time she tries to boot up in safe mode she gets an error and it reboots the computer. I'm out of ideas, is she going to have to reformat her drive to get rid of this monster? If so, would backing up old music / word documents be ill-advised, if they were created before she contracted the virus? Thanks for your help!

TL;DR

-Antivirus programs are shut down immediately (Tried two, and yes, removed one before installing the other)

-Anti-spyware programs are shut down immediately (Again, tried two)

-HijackThis freezes

-Cannot boot in safe mode

-Reformat only option?

-Backing up information from before infection too risky?

[Waylon 2]

Well you can actually get a tech online that will go in and remove the virus/s for her. It costs like 90 bucks I think. I've never heard of a virus like that.... wow.

http://www.symantec.com/norton/support/pre...emium_virus.jsp

If she hasn't reformatted for a while or ever, its worth doing any way, but I wouldn't back anything up if there is a virus and undetectable being you could back that up and have the same issue. Let me know. I also have free Symantec Endpoint and Macfee Antivirus and Firewall.

[UnknownLegend 5480]

Well you can actually get a tech online that will go in and remove the virus/s for her. It costs like 90 bucks I think. I've never heard of a virus like that.... wow.

http://www.symantec.com/norton/support/pre...emium_virus.jsp

If she hasn't reformatted for a while or ever, its worth doing any way, but I wouldn't back anything up if there is a virus and undetectable being you could back that up and have the same issue. Let me know. I also have free Symantec Endpoint and Macfee Antivirus and Firewall.

Thanks, I just spammed that post in like 3 other tech forums and I got a response. We used a program called ComboFix, which actually was able to run. It cleansed the malware completely, everything is running great now.