Question

W32.spybot.worm in XP Home - wupdate.exe - removal

Asked by: paulbasel

I am helping a friend in ridding his computer of spybots, trojans, etc and there were plenty of them. I was successful in all but one, the dreaded W32.spybot.worm. I followed the instructions given by TrendMicro and have successfully eliminated the wupdate.exe files in both the system32 and prefetch directories, and some of the registry settings. I say some, because no matter what I do the registry settings seem to reappear. The wupdate.exe file is gone.

I used sysinternals process explorer to kill the running wupdate process, turned off the system restore, and rebooted in safe mode. I deleted the two wupdate.exe files, deleted every instance of the wupdate I could find in the registry (per TrendMicro's instructions), rebooted, turned system restore back on, and the blasted creature is still shows up as a running process and some of the registry settings have been reestablished.

Is it possible that there is such a thing as a "legitimate" wupdate running process that should not be deleted and Windows is reestablishing it upon reboot? If not, can anyone suggest how to kill this thing.

Paul

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Asked On
2004-07-07 at 07:42:43ID21050585
Tags

removal

Topic

Windows XP Operating System

Participating Experts
4
Points
500
Comments
27

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