Unfortunate situation

[Obryn]

All those windows patches with the innocuous wording "could allow someone to take over your computer if etc" is the "how" in most targeted cases. OSes have vulnerabilities.

I know, but this doesn't sound like a virus. It's possible someone is messing around with you in real-time via a remote administration trojan, but that's a ton of effort to spend on a random messageboard poster. With all due respect, I just don't think any of us are that important, and nobody is wasting an unpublished zero-day exploit on something as silly as this.

Funny you should mention a ridiculous amount of trouble. The input loop that goes off is typed very slowly, including backspacing to delete mistakes, and here is the funny thing: in two cases the final typed input deviates from what I actually posted, minor typos that I didn't make. So unless it is randomly modifying the input, in the exact same way every time including making errors and then backspacing over them, someone manually retyped my posts to use them as an input loop.

If that isn't indicative of effort I don't know what is. So yeah, I'd really like to know for sure before I reformat. Which I am going to do tomorrow... just the primary partition, none of my files. If it doesn't work then... I'll think of something.

IMO, that is the way to go. A clean install will fix up anything that could be wrong. As I've said, the most common attack vectors these days are Javascript and ... well, anything Adobe. Make sure those are updated (as well as your Windows patches, of course).

I think it's more likely that something else is going on. A reformat/reinstall will clean that up, too.

-O

 

[renau1g]

So kinda off-topic, but why's this in the 4e Discussion area and not Meta? That seems more appropriate.

 

[TarionzCousin]

FWIW, you may not have a virus at all. I've seen corrupt drivers and bad hardware cause many of the same issues that you're experiencing.

It's way past time to fire that guy and hire yourself a new chauffeur!

 

[Eridanis]

You've gotten some good replies, so I'll move this to the right forum, now. Good luck!