This is a blanket "thank you" to all the folks who wrote in with suggestions and/or offers of help with my computer virus problem. Lucky me, I had two at once. From what I can tell, the first one somehow managed to bypass and then disable my virus program. It should not have been able to do this — it's an old, known virus that the software is supposed to protect me from — but it did and that opened the door for the second. Both infected my main computer and the first one got onto my main computer, my secondary computer, two external Maxtor harddrives and three SanDisk cruzer flashdrives. Quite an ambitious little fellow, I'd say.
Cleaning involved my regular virus program, an online virus scan and two other virus programs which I downloaded and ran in trial mode. Collectively, they identified both viruses — albeit under an array of different names — and removed the one that was only on one computer. Getting rid of the other was a little harder. I had to go in and manually kill processes, delete hidden files, delete registry entries and restore a few files from a recent backup. All four pieces of anti-virus software I used claimed they could remove this second virus but for some reason, none of them could. Still, they gave me the info that enabled me to research the virus and then figure out how to do the manual scrub job.
End of story? Unfortunately, no. I got the virus off my main computer but not before it nuked something in the boot sequence. I'm pretty sure all the data's there…I just can't get to it. To deal with this, I took the easy way: Shipped it over to my computer guy and told him to build me a new computer, boot the old one off another drive and then transfer my data over. I was about due for a new P.C., anyway. It should be here by the weekend.
But thanks to all who offered help. A couple of you suggested I chuck the Windows systems and defect to the World of Mac, where viruses are pretty much non-existent. True…but I think I have too much invested in this software in terms of knowledge, money and emotion to start cross-dressing now. And you'd better all be glad I feel this way because if I ever did switch to a Mac, someone would surely invent a killer virus for them…a bad one that would nuke your data, destroy your system and tell everyone you went to high school with that you wet the bed.