Some of our user's computers have been infected with the latest email worm viruses infecting the Internet.

We know this because we are receiving dozens of these viral emails daily which are sent from your infected computers working in the background without your knowledge. If you have early versions of Windows or anti virus software which is not updated regularly, it is likely that your computer is affected. One virus activates itself even if you have never opened the attachment

REMEMBER - NEVER open an email attachment unless you are expecting to be sent one from the sender.

To check if you computer is infected and to clean it, download and run the Avast virus cleaner program. Click Here to download. ( Download time is less than 1 minute ). The cleaner program is not meant to replace your antivirus program, it just removes a limited number of the most recent worms/viruses. If you do not update your antivirus program weekly, then use it every 2 or 3 weeks.

Save it to any folder on your computer or your desktop and double click to run, read the notes below before running it. We have used it on some of our computers with no harmful side effects

The program works on the following operating systems

- Windows 95
- Windows 98
- Windows Me
- Windows NT 4
- Windows 2000
- Windows XP

Finally when your computer has been cleaned, you really should use Windows Update to download all the latest security patches from microsoft, even though the process can often take a few hours
N.B. I would be very interested to hear feedback from you if your computer was infected

Important notes

During the scanning process, it is highly recommended not to start any applications. As already pointed out, some worms will start automatically when any other application is started. Running worm processes are terminated/deactivated only during the first phase of the avast! Virus Cleaner scanning; if you activate the worm again in the middle of the scanning process (by starting another application, such as Notepad, Explorer, ...), the worm will probably not be removed from your computer!

Turn off any resident (on-access) antivirus protection before running avast! Virus Cleaner. avast! Virus Cleaner has to access the infected files to be able to identify and remove them. The resident protection, however, might not permit it - and the worm could not be removed from your computer! Do not forget to activate the resident protection again after avast! Virus Cleaner has finished the disinfection.
avast! Virus Cleaner should be used in case you know or suspect that your computer is infected. It is not meant as an antivirus solution for everyday use! Use e.g. avast! 4 Home/Professional to protect your computer.
To work correctly, the Cleaner requires administrator privileges when running on Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 operating systems. On an infected computer, however, it might not be wise to log in as a privileged user (administrator) - it may help the worm to spread even further. Therefore, you can start avast! Cleaner as a restricted user and enter the administrator login name and password directly into an avast! Virus Cleaner dialog; in such a case, the Cleaner will be run with the privileged user access rights - however, the privileged user will not be actually logged on, and none of his/her startup files will be processed.

Solving other problems
If you have deleted a virus or worm file associated to a vital file type - and now you cannot run your applications anymore, avast! Virus Cleaner may help you as well. All you have to do is run avast! Virus Cleaner "somehow". If, for example, only the association for .EXE files has been corrupted, you may run the avast! Virus Cleaner by renaming it to a .COM file. The other extensions you may try are .SCR, .BAT, .PIF (on Windows NT/2000/XP/2003, you may try .CMD as well). If none of these extensions works (Windows is still reporting "Cannot find 'xyz.exe'" when you try to start the tool), you can use avast! Virus Cleaner itself as a replacement for the missing file. However, you have to know the name of the missing file to do that; if you know it, just rename the avast! Virus Cleaner file to the missing name (and move it to the corresponding folder, if necessary). Now, starting any application should bring up avast! Virus Cleaner instead. As soon as it starts, it detects that some of the vital file associations are corrupted, reports the problem and allows you to fix it immediately.

Regards

Loadup Admin