Date: 05/06/07 (Computer Help)    Keywords: rss, software, virus, web, spyware, google

I'm trying to help my Mom out with her computer.

She bought a Sony Vaio desktop in Winter 2003/2004 at Best Buy. She bought it to replace the Gateway desktop that my brothers had basically killed. She intended for them to use the old computer and she'd use the new one - but slowly my brothers got hold of her computer too.

We ran a virus scan this week and she had something like 30+ "threats" that were spyware, adware, or viruses.

I backed up all her photos to CDs and then used the Vaio Recovery Wizard which is supposed to restore your compute to the day the factory built it.

Now her 30+ threats are gone (where Norton couldn't get rid of them before), but she's still getting the same error message when she starts up her computer (she has to hit F2 to get to some screen - then from that screen she has to hit Esc and then Enter), but she's gotten used to that (I have no idea what the hell happened there!) All night, every couple minutes, she's been getting these error messages saying that she needs a registry cleaner, that there's an error, etc.

We Ctrl-Alt-Del to get the Task Manager up and click on the error message to find the process. The process is csrss.exe. I Googled it and it says that is a normal System file - but if it's located elsewhere it's a virus. Well, it is located in the folder it's supposed to be in, but she's constantly getting these messages. They're telling her that her system is corrupted and she needs to go to a website to download a registry cleaner. We tried about 3 of those web addresses, but she keeps just getting software that finds errors, but won't let her fix them unless she pays $39.95 (or whatever that particular program charges) for the program.

Any ideas? Should she pay for one of those programs? Should she just keep ignoring the pop-ups? Or should she just suck it up, bring her computer to Best Buy / Geek Squad, and have them fix it for her?

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computer_help/776012.html