For those of you who are still struggling after some of the suggestions by other users, I have stumbled upon a solution that fixed my issues. I am a system administrator, running xp, visa and win 7 desktops, one day my vista and win 7 machines did the black screen and moving cursor thing. None of the cntrl + alt + dlt things quite worked for me, so I investigated a hard drive that was affected by this virus / malware by putting the hard drive into another machine that was working just perfectly. The thing I have found was that this virus / malware changes permissions and ownership, in vista and win 7 it takes ownership of system files which doesn’t allow you to boot up your machine properly. Windows xp reacts differently to the virus /malware, in win xp it affects your printing, the start toolbar disappears, and the best of all is it affects your ms office, you get weird error messages when opening documents or it doesn’t allow you to open any documents at all. The way I fixed all of my machines, whether it was XP, vista or win 7, was the following method:
Take the hard drive of the affected machine, put it into another machine that is working perfectly, make sure that the other machine has a decent antivirus on ( I used Mcafee) because you have to do a full scan, and after that you go to my computer and right click on the affected machine’s hard drive, go to properties and then the security tab. Now I have seen that mostly it deletes a security group or user so you’ll notice that where all the users and groups are listed, usually there is a user which only consists out of a string of numbers( long string) which indicates that the user or group has been deleted. All you have to do is take ownership of the drive, restore all the default permissions to the drive and replace all the child objects with the ownership and permissions and you are good to go.
This is what the default permissions would look like:
Default permissions:
Administrators Full Control
Creator/Owner Full Control
Everyone Change
System Full Control
Now go to “advanced” button at the bottom of the security tab, this will give you permissions tab, auditing, owner etc. Under the permissions tab, add the default permissions so that it looks similar to the above example, when finished, make sure you tick the “replace permission ……” box at the bottom of the window, this will apply all the permissions right down to all the files and folders and not only to the drive itself. After you have ticked the checkbox, click apply, you’ll see a small window applying permissions to files and folders, this usually takes a while, depends on the amount of data on your hard drive. Once it is done, go to the Owner’s tab, select administrator or administrators , then check the “replace permissions…..” checkbox at the bottom of the window, and press apply, this will give a similar window when applying permissions to files and folders, but this only takes ownership of files and folders. Now once all of this is done, put the hard drive back in the affected pc. Once you start it up, sometimes for some reason it asks you if you want to boot in save mode, if it does, its best to do so although I have booted in normal mode and it still worked anyways.
Hope this helps someone.
